Marketing Psychology & Direct Response Principles

What it does

Marketing Psychology & Direct Response Principles is a Cursor skill: a SKILL.md playbook that AgenticKit installs at .cursor/skills/marketing-psychology. Cursor's agent loads it when the task matches the skill description, instead of stuffing the same rules into every chat.

Applying behavioral psychology and direct response principles to increase conversion rates, reduce cognitive friction, and overcome objections.

Loss aversion, social proof, reciprocity, urgency, and cognitive load. The file is domain knowledge, not a slash macro. You do not type it. The agent reads it when the job is marketing psychology.

Why it exists

Default Cursor has no memory of how your team ships positioning, copy, and launch assets. Founders paste the same conventions into chat, then watch the model drift on the next turn. This skill exists so those conventions live on disk and load only when relevant.

It ships in the Marketing Kit. It is wired to the Direct Response Copywriter (copywriter) and Growth Marketing Lead (growth-strategist) agents. It is wired to the /landing-page: High-Converting Landing Page Copy Architect and /email-sequence: Customer Onboarding & Drip Email Sequence commands. That graph is the point: the skill is the standard, the agent is the role, the command is the trigger.

When to use it

• Use Marketing Psychology & Direct Response Principles when the work is specifically about loss aversion, social proof, reciprocity, urgency, and cognitive load.
• Load it before a long session that will touch this surface more than once. A one-line edit does not need the full playbook.
• Use it when you are writing something a buyer will see: landing copy, launch posts, SEO pages, or positioning docs.

When not to use it

• Do not treat the skill as a replacement for a slash command. Skills teach. Commands run a pipeline.
• Do not paste the whole SKILL.md into chat. If Cursor is not loading it, fix the description or invoke the matching command.
• Do not use it to generate spam or spray the same launch post across every channel.

Example workflow

1. Install the Marketing Kit so .cursor/skills/marketing-psychology lands in the repo.
2. Open a new Cursor agent chat pointed at the files this skill governs.
3. Ask the Direct Response Copywriter (copywriter) to read the skill, or run /landing-page: High-Converting Landing Page Copy Architect.
4. Review the first artifact against the practices below. If it violates one, stop and correct the file. Do not prompt 'just finish it'.
5. Commit the skill-guided files with the rest of the slice so the next session inherits the same standard.

Example usage

Example prompt: "Read .cursor/skills/marketing-psychology and apply it to this change. Do not invent extra conventions."

Or trigger the pipeline: /landing-page: High-Converting Landing Page Copy Architect. That command is written to load this skill.

Check the output against: Use loss aversion to illustrate time and money wasted on manual repetitive tasks

Example output

• The skill itself does not write a single output file. It changes what the agent is allowed to produce in positioning, copy, and launch assets.
• When you run /landing-page: High-Converting Landing Page Copy Architect, expect repo files plus notes under docs/, not a chat-only answer.

Best practices

• Use loss aversion to illustrate time and money wasted on manual repetitive tasks
• Provide immediate reciprocity through free tools and ungated developer guides
• Display credible social proof (GitHub stars, maker testimonials, usage numbers)
• Reduce cognitive decision fatigue by offering clear, opinionated pricing tiers

Common mistakes

• Ignoring "Use loss aversion to illustrate time and money wasted on manual repetitive tasks" and hoping a later prompt will clean it up.
• Copying the skill into .cursor/rules as always-on. That burns context and fights Cursor's load-on-match design.
• Running two overlapping skills that contradict each other in the same turn.
• Publishing generated copy without a human pass. The skill is a playbook, not a publisher.