Marketing Psychology

Apply behavioral science to marketing decisions by diagnosing the friction first. A list of cognitive biases is close to useless in practice — you can't look up "which bias applies to my landing page." What you actually have is a symptom: people arrive and don't sign up, or sign up and don't activate, or reach checkout and leave.

This skill works backwards from the symptom. Name the friction, then apply the two or three principles that actually address that friction. Applying scarcity to a comprehension problem does nothing except make the copy louder.

The ethical line is structural here, not a footnote. The test that runs through every recommendation: does this make a true thing easier to choose, or a false thing more persuasive? The first is good marketing. The second is manipulation, it is increasingly illegal, and it reliably costs more than it earns.

When to use

The user is designing or fixing a conversion surface — pricing page, landing page, signup flow, onboarding, email, offer, CTA — or asking why people aren't converting despite the message being right.

Before you start

1. Read the brand/product context first. If .agents/product-marketing.md or .agents/aaj-brand.md exists, use it for audience, voice, and offer.
2. Get the symptom, not the guess. Where exactly do people drop off? "Conversion is low" isn't actionable; "70% reach pricing and 4% start a trial" is.
3. Establish awareness state. Cold traffic is problem-aware at best; retargeting is product-aware. The same friction has different fixes at different states.
4. Collect what's actually true. Real numbers, real customer counts, real deadlines, real inventory. Every principle below has a legitimate version and a fabricated one, and the only difference is whether the underlying fact is true.