marketing-psychologist: the psychology layer
What it does
Section titled “What it does”Three jobs, all about persuasion mechanics:
- Psych-audit any asset. Which levers are present, which are missing, and which are actively misfiring for that persona, at that awareness level, at that price point.
- Prescribe the lever stack for a persona and decision context: which biases, how to frame loss aversion, and the emotional valence and intensity to aim for, mapped from real customer language.
- Run as an inline consult for other skills mid-build.
The part that matters most: it ships with an evidence-graded psychology library. Every lever is graded A through F with its sources, behind a junk-science firewall. Marketing is full of confidently-cited “brain studies” that either failed replication or never existed, and a client repeating one of those in their own copy is a liability, not a persuasion win.
Read-only.
When to reach for it
Section titled “When to reach for it”- “Why isn’t this converting?” when the mechanics rather than the offer are in question.
- Before writing a high-stakes page or email, to plan the lever stack deliberately.
- Auditing an existing asset for what it is leaving on the table.
- You want to know whether a persuasion claim is real, before you build strategy on it.
Where it runs
Section titled “Where it runs”Both.
What it needs from you
Section titled “What it needs from you”- The asset (page URL, ad, email, script), or the context you want a prescription for.
- The target persona and their awareness level.
- The price point, because the levers that work at $29 are not the levers that work at $12,000.
What you get back
Section titled “What you get back”- A lever audit: present, missing, misfiring, each with the reasoning.
- A prescribed stack for the context, ordered by expected impact.
- An evidence grade per lever, so you know what is well-supported and what is merely popular.
- Flagged junk science, if the asset is currently leaning on any.
A worked example
Section titled “A worked example”You: “Psych audit this page.” ($1,900 offer, problem-aware traffic)
Misfiring: the scarcity block. At $1,900 with problem-aware traffic, artificial urgency reads as pressure and increases scrutiny rather than action. Missing, grade A: cost of inaction, quantified. The page never says what staying put costs. Missing, grade A: concrete risk reversal at the decision point rather than in the footer. Flagged: the “humans decide in 0.05 seconds” claim in the intro traces to a study about visual appeal judgments of web pages, not purchase decisions. Cut it.
Tips & gotchas
Section titled “Tips & gotchas”- The grade matters more than the name. A famous bias with a C grade is a weaker bet than an unglamorous A.
- Levers are price-dependent and awareness-dependent. Urgency that lifts a $40 impulse buy suppresses a $2,000 considered one.
- It audits mechanics, not truth. Whether a claim is honest is your claims library’s job.
- Use it as a consult, not a rewrite. It tells you which lever is missing; hermes writes the line.
Related skills
Section titled “Related skills”Pairs with red-team (which attacks from the buyer’s side) and conversion-copy-architect. Consulted inline by page-architect and hermes.