Category: Branding

💎 On hard to read fonts improving the care with which people read (Moses’s Arc)

If there is a dark side to fluency, might there be a bright side to its opposite, disfluency? Alter’s work suggests there might be. In one of his studies, he printed a simple, easy-to-read question: “How many animals of each kind did Moses take on the ark?” Many respondents said two. But when the question was printed in a harder-to-read font, respondents were 35 percent more likely to recognize that it was Noah, not Moses, who built the ark. The less legible font made people more careful readers.

Excerpt from: Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction by Derek Thompson

💎 On how labels can determine how enjoyable our experiences are (cheese and body odour)

Recent research indicates that suggestion not only influences what we smell, but also how we react to smells. In 2005 researchers at Oxford University asked subjects to sniff two odors, one labeled cheddar cheese and the other body odor. Predictably, the subjects rated the body odor as significantly more unpleasant. However, the two smells were identical. Only the labels differed. Consider that the next time you’re enjoying some especially pungent cheese at a cocktail party.

Excerpt from: Elephants on Acid and other bizarre experiments by Alex Boese

💎 On how the company a brand keeps determines what consumers think of it (who are you compared to?)

When consumers who know a lot about cars were asked to evaluate a Honda ad, they rated it more favourably when it was surrounded by ads for prestigious brands like Armani and Rolex, than when it was in the context of less premium brands like Timex and Old Navy. When Simonson and Yoon compared how people evaluated the attractiveness of a series of products, including lawn mowers, food processors, and cars, they found that the strength of preference for a product was influenced by the context of choices presented at the time. For example, when a pen was selected from a set where it was significantly better than another, participants would pay more for it and think it wrote better than when the same pen was selected from a more balanced set of options. With the vast sums spent on advertising, a relatively small investment replicating Simonson and Yoon’s study for your own products and media options could lead to a dramatic difference in the way people feel about your brand.

Excerpt from: Consumerology: The Truth about Consumers and the Psychology of Shopping by Philip Graves

💎 On how statistics lack emotional impact when compared to images (numbers versus coffins)

For eighteen years, the American media was prohibited from showing photographs of fallen soldiers’ coffins. In February 2009, defence secretary Robert Gates lifted this ban and images flooded on to the Internet. Officially, family members have to give their approval before anything is published, but such a rule is unenforceable. Why was this ban created in the first place? To conceal the true costs of war. We can easily find out the number of casualties, but statistics leave us cold. People, on the other hand, especially dead people, spark an emotional reaction.

Excerpt from: The Art of Thinking Clearly by Rolf Dobelli

💎 On how research nearly killed the great Audi slogan (confident brand heritage)

This was the case with our early work for Audi, and even by 1983 we were still struggling to establish the Audi’s German heritage in a way that was motivating and memorable. We’d written a number of commercials that were due to air but still needed a hook to tie them together.

I remember, on one of my trips to the Audi factory in Ingolstadt, seeing the line ‘Vorsprung durch Technik’ on a fading piece of publicity. When I asked about it our guide dismissed it, saying it was an old line they used in the early 70s.

But it stuck in my mind. When it came to binding our different commercials together I thought, why not use this line? And, importantly, let’s keep it in German. Mad as that sounds…

Excerpt from: Hegarty on Advertising: Turning Intelligence into Magic by John Hegarty

💎 On how priming lowers our threshold of attention (Baader-Meinhof phenomenon)

Have you ever learned a new word (or heard of an obscure sea mammal or an ethnic dance) and then encountered it several times in the space of a few days? You come across it in the news, you overhear it mentioned on the bus and on the radio, and the old issue of National Geographic you’re thumbing through falls open to an article on it. . .

This is priming (fortified with a few low-grade coincidences). When yon skim the newspaper, half-listen to TV, or drive on the motorway, you ignore most of what’s going on around you. Only a few things command attention. Paradoxically, it is unconscious processes that choose which stimuli to pass on to full consciousness. Prior exposure to something (priming) lowers the threshold of attention, so that that something is more likely to be noticed. The upshot is that you have probably encountered your ‘new’ word or car many times before. It’s just that now you’re noticing.

Excerpt from: Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value (and How to Take Advantage of It) by William Poundstone

💎 On how our expectations of a product shape our experience of it (our beliefs are hard to break)

Consider green goods. Rebecca Strong and I conducted an experiment to quantify the impact of labelling washing-machine tablets as ‘ecologically friendly’.

We sent a group of consumers the same type of washing-machine tablet. They washed a load of clothes and reported back on the tablets performance. The twist was that half were told that they were testing a standard supermarket tablet, the other half a green variant.

Once again, there was an element of subterfuge. We didn’t ask consumers directly what they thought of green goods. Generally, they make positive noises. Instead, we monitored behaviour in test and control conditions.

The results were clear. Those who used the green variant rated the tablet as worse on all metrics.

Respondents scored the eco tablet 9% lower for both effectiveness and likeability, while the number who would recommend the product was 11% lower and the number who would buy it themselves, 18% lower than for the standard version.

Despite eco-friendly products often having a higher price, consumers who tested the green tablet were only prepared to pay £4.41 on average compared to £4.82 for the standard version. Consumers believe that products involve a trade-off: improved eco-friendliness entails corresponding loss in cleaning efficacy. This is a concern for any brand interested in a green variant. If brands in this category are going to successfully sell green variants, they’ll need to counteract these negative associations, or spend heavily to bolster their cleaning credentials.

Excerpt from: The Choice Factory: 25 behavioural biases that influence what we buy by Richard Shotton

💎 On how much we value a product partly depending on what we compare it to (choose your comparisons carefully)

Christopher Hsee, George Loewenstein, Sally Blount and Max H. Bazerman once ran an experiment in which they asked people browsing used textbooks how much they would pay for a music dictionary that had 10,000 words and was in perfect condition. Another group was asked how much they would pay for a music dictionary with 20,000 words but a torn front cover. Neither group knew about the other dictionary. On average, the students were willing to pay $24 for the 10,000-word dictionary and $20 for the cover-torn 20,000-word one. The cover – irrelevant to looking up words – made a big difference.

The researchers then cornered another group and presented them with both options simultaneously. Now the students could compare the two options side by side. That changed their perception of the products. In this easy-to-compare group, the students said they would pay $19 for the 10,000-word dictionary and $27 for the 20,000-word one with the torn cover. Suddenly, with the introduction of a more clearly comparable aspect – number of words – the larger dictionary became more valuable, despite the torn cover.

Excerpt from: Small Change: Money Mishaps and How to Avoid Them by Dan Ariely and Jeff Kreisler

💎 On the danger of grandiose marketing objectives (wishful bullshit)

Macho marketing language is common, but dangerous. And objective setting is where it’s perhaps most dangerous. Marketing plans are littered with words like ‘disrupting’ and ‘transforming’. Plans hardly ever use more modest, but more realistic, words like ‘nudging’, ‘reinforcing’ or ‘reassuring’ – they just don’t sound impressive enough. It probably doesn’t help that the box on the brief titled ‘objective’ has often been replaced nowadays by one called ‘ambition’ or ‘vision’. And when the brand plan writer won’t be there in two years’ time anyway, they may as well write wishful bullshit.

Excerpt from: How not to Plan: 66 ways to screw it up by Les Binet and Sarah Carter

💎 On the dangers of a mindless deference to authority (rectal earache)

Errors in the medicine patients receive can occur for a variety of reasons. However, a book entitled Medication Errors: Causes and Prevention by two Temple University pharmacology professors, Michael Cohen and Neil Davis, attributes much of the problem to the mindless deference given the “boss” of the patient’s case: the attending physician. According to Professor Cohen, “in case after case, patients, nurses, pharmacists, and other physicians do not question the prescription.” Take, for example, the strange case of the “rectal earache” reported by Cohen and Davis. A physician ordered ear drops to be administered to the right ear of a patient suffering pain and infection there. But instead of writing out completely the location “right ear” on the prescription, the doctor abbreviated it so that the instructions read “place in R ear. Upon receiving the prescription. the duty nurse promptly put the required number of ear drops into the patient’s anus.

Excerpt from: Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini

💎 On making communication entertaining and to the point (nobody wants to read your shit)

Nobody wants to read anything.

Let me repeat that. Nobody—not even your dog or your mother—has the slightest interest in your commercial for Rice Krispies or Delco batteries or Preparation H. Nor does anybody care about your one-act play, your Facebook page or your new sesame chicken joint at Canal and Tchoupitoulas.

It isn’t that people are mean or cruel. They’re just busy.

Nobody wants to read your shit.

Excerpt from: The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles by Steven Pressfield

💎 On claiming to do one thing well versus listing multiple benefits (perceived as less effective)

When an activity claims to satisfy multiple goals it is perceived as less effective than an activity with a single dedicated goal.

Students rated aerobic exercise as a more effective means of achieving a goal when it was described with one health goal (protecting from heart disease) than two goals (protecting from heart disease and maintaining healthy bones).

UNSEEN OPPORTUNITY

To maximise perceived effectiveness, you may need to claim to do just one thing well rather than present a longer list of I multiple benefits.

Excerpt from: The Unseen Mind by Ogilvy Change

💎 On the power of imagery (to teach)

We are more likely to remember concepts if they are presented to us as pictures rather than words.

For example, one study of discharged emergency room patients provided half of the participants with text-only instructions to properly care for their wounds, whilst the other half were given both text and cartoon depictions of each step. Three days later, 46% of patients given illustrated instructions demonstrated perfect recall of the prescribed techniques, compared to just 6% in the text-only condition.

Excerpt from: The Unseen Mind by Ogilvy Change

💎 On giving people a licence to indulge (McDonalds salads)

My favorite example of this gap between the behavioral self and the aspirational self has nothing to do with reading, but usefully extends the foodie metaphor beyond doughnuts. In the early to mid-2000s, McDonald’s got more aggressive about promoting healthy options like salad and fruit on its menus. But its revenue growth in those years was due entirely to people eating more greasy fare, like cheeseburgers and fried chicken. New healthy options seemed to lure wannabe dieters into the restaurant, where they would order fast-food basics. In 2010, a group of wordsmithing Duke University researchers called this phenomenon “vicarious goal fulfillment.” Merely considering something that’s “good for you” satisfies a goal and grants license to indulge. People say they want hard news in their social media feeds, but mostly click on funny photos. People say they want to eat greens, but mostly order greasy sandwiches at salad-serving restaurants. People aren’t lying— they do want to be the sort of person who reads news! They do want to see salad options!—but mere proximity to good behavior satisfies their interest in behaving well.

Excerpt from: Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction by Derek Thompson

💎 On the importance of setting (Stradivarius but only if they know it’s a Stradivarius)

The French social scientist Claudia Fritz has examined, in various settings, the preferences of accomplished violinists for instruments made by old Italian masters like Stradivari. Everyone knows, if only from hearing of these incredibly valuable instruments being left in the backs of taxicabs, how lush and resonant they must sound, as if bestowed with some ancient, now lost magic. Who would not want to play one? But the expert musicians she has tested tend to prefer, under blind conditions, the sound of new violins.

In his book Strangers to Ourselves, Timothy Wilson has argued that we are often unaware why we respond to things the way we do; much of this behavior occurs in what he calls the “adaptive unconscious.”

Excerpt from: You May Also Like: Taste in an Age of Endless Choice by Tom Vanderbilt

💎 On stories persuading us more than bland stats (even for the most serious of matters)

Another frightening example comes from the realm of medicine. This time participants were given information on the effectiveness of treatments as a percentage of those cured overall (ranging from 90 to 30 percent). This is known as base rate information. They were also given a story, which could be positive, negative, or ambiguous.

For instance, the positive story read as follows: Pat’s decision to undergo Tamoxol resulted in a positive outcome. The entire worm was destroyed. Doctors were confident the disease would not resume its course. At one-month post-treatment, Pat’s recovery was certain.

The negative story read: Pat’s decision to undergo Tamoxol resulted in a poor outcome. The worm was not completely destroyed. The disease resumed its course. At 1-month post-treatment, Pat was blind and had lost the ability to walk.

Subjects were then asked would they undergo the treatment if they were diagnosed with the disease. Of course, people should have relied upon the base rate information of the effectiveness of treatment as it represented a foil sample of experience. But did this actually happen?

Of course not. Instead the base rate information was essentially ignored in favor of the anecdotal story. For instance, when participants were given a positive story and were told the treatment was 90 percent effective, 88 percent of people thought they would go with the treatment. However, when the participants were given a negative story and again told the treatment was 90 percent effective, only 39 percent of people opted to pursue this line of treatment.

Conversely, when told the treatment was only 30 percent effective and given a negative story, only 7 percent said they would follow this treatment. However, when low effectiveness was combined with a good story, 78 percent of people said they would take the drug. As you can see, the evidence on effectiveness of the treatments was completely ignored in favor of the power of the story.

Excerpt from: The Little Book of Behavioral Investing: How not to be your own worst enemy by James Montier

💎 On the adjective order that every English speaker knows but none of us can articulate (Hyperbaton)

The reason for Tolkien’s mistake, since you ask, is that adjectives in English absolutely have to be in this order: opinion-size-age-shape-colour-origin-material-purpose Noun. So you can have a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife. But if you mess with that word order in the slightest you’ll sound like a maniac. It’s an odd thing that every English speaker uses that list, but almost none of us could write it out. And as size comes before colour, green great dragons can’t exist.

Excerpt from: The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase by Mark Forsyth

💎 On “decision by committee” leading to grey advertising (outcome is predictable and safe work)

Decision by committee needs to be scrapped. Group decisions are becoming more and more common in business, but when it comes to advertising, the result is often a very costly and public mess.

When the consensus of a large number of people has to be reached, the most likely outcome is predictable and safe work. “They sit there in committees day after day, and they each put in a color and it comes out grey.”

Allan Sherman, American writer and television producer.

Excerpt from: How To Make Better Advertising And Advertising Better by Vic Polinghorne and Andy Palmer

💎 On the importance of brands signalling they’re interested in repeat business (tourist restaurant versus local pub)

What keeps the relationship honest, trusting and mutually beneficial is nothing other than the prospect of repetition.

In game theory, this prospect of repetition is known variously as ‘continuation probability’ or ‘w’. Robert Axelrod has poetically referred to it as ‘the shadow of the future’. It is agreed by both game theorists and evolutionary biologists that the prospects for cooperation are far greater when there is a high expectation of repetition than in single shot games. Clay Shirky has even described social capital as ‘the shadow of the future at a societal scale’. Yet businesses barely consider this at all (in fact procurement, by setting shorter and shorter contract periods, may be unwittingly working to reduce cooperation).

Yet there are, when you think about it, two different approaches to business. There is the ‘tourist restaurant’ approach, where you try to make as much money from people on their single visit. And then there is the ‘local pub’ approach, where you make less money from people on each visit, but you profit(?) more over time by encouraging people to come back. The second type business is much more likely to generate that + yield positive sum outcomes then the first.

Excerpt from: Eat Your Greens by Wiemer Snijders

💎 On irony in advertising (ridiculing conventional persuasive techniques)

Irony itself can be elusive to define, but in ads it usually means the ridiculing of conventional persuasive techniques. As far back as 1932, Jack Benny told this joke about the sponsor of his radio show: ‘I was driving across the Sahara Desert when I came across a party of people who had been stranded for 30 days without a drop of water, and they were ready to perish. I gave each of them a glass of Canada Dry Ginger Ale, and not one of them said it was a bad drink.’

Excerpt from: 100 Ideas That Changed Advertising by Simon Veksner

💎 On the long history of celebrities spreading social change (Queen Victoria and labour pains)

Women had been fighting a long battle for respite from labour pains, and the survey made it plain that the battle was yet to be won. For decades, there had been widespread opposition to pain relief in labour, because it was deemed to go against the word of God. (‘In sorrow thou shalt bring forth children,’ the sinful Eve was told – Genesis 3:16.) But two events started to turn things around. One was the discovery that chloroform had anaesthetic properties. The other was that Queen Victoria secretly called a doctor to the birth of her eighth child, Prince Leopold, in 1853 and demanded that he give her some of this new-fangled chloroform to get her through. The palace denied the event for several years, but it nevertheless helped to disseminate the idea that taking pain relief in labour was an acceptable thing to do.

Excerpt from: The Life Project: The Extraordinary Story of Our Ordinary Lives by Helen Pearson

💎 On making a claim more concrete to make it more believable (in this case by adding imagery)

Sometimes, increasing a statement’s truthiness can be as simple as adding an irrelevant picture. In one rather macabre experiment from 2012, Newman showed her participants statements about a series of famous figures – such as a sentence claiming that the indie singer Nick Cave was dead. When the statement was accompanied by a stock photo of the singer, they were more likely to believe that the statement was true, compared to the participants who saw only the plain text.

The photo of Nick Cave could, of course, have been taken at any point in his life. It makes no sense that someone would use it as evidence – it just shows you that he’s a musician in a random band,’ Newman told me. ‘But from a psychological perspective it made sense. Anything that would make it easy to picture or easy to imagine something should sway someone’s judgement.’

Excerpt from: The Intelligence Trap: Why Smart People Do Stupid Things and how to Make Wiser Decisions by David Robson

💎 On messages from untrustworthy sources still having an impact (why propaganda works)

Amazingly, just the opposite is true for propaganda. If it strikes a chord with someone, this influence will only increase over time. Why? Psychologist Carl Hovland, who led the study for the war department, named this phenomenon the sleeper effect. To date, the best explanation is that, in our memories, the source of the argument fades faster than the argument. In other words, your brain quickly forgets where the information came from (e.g. from the department of propaganda). Meanwhile, the message itself (i.e., war is necessary and noble) fades only slowly or even endures. Therefore, any knowledge that stems from an untrustworthy source gains credibility over time. The discrediting force melts away faster than the message does.

Excerpt from: The Art of Thinking Clearly by Rolf Dobelli

💎 On making your audience think for themselves (f_____)

A key principle here is ‘the generation effect’ – that is, the finding that a message is significantly better remembered if the audience actually thinks it themselves, rather than just reading it superficially. Researchers at the University of Toronto assigned participants to one of two conditions: half of them read pairs of words that were associated in some way, such as rhyming or being semantically linked, like rapid-fast; while the other half were shown one word and the initial letter of its pair, like rapid-f_____. Afterwards, participants completed a test of recognition for the matched words. Those who simply read the words scored an average of 69%, while those who mentally generated the words scored 85%.

Excerpt from: Hooked: Revealing the hidden tricks of memorable marketing by Patrick Fagan

💎 On the need for ads to leave a little something for viewers to do (dot-to-dot)

My former partner Rich Silverstein used to talk about effective advertising using the analogy of those dot-to-dot games we all used to play as children. I’m sure you remember joining numbered dot to numbered dot. trying to guess what you’re drawing as the picture slowly emerges. Dot, to dot, to dot… then, with just one stroke of the pencil, it is suddenly clear. You have a picture of a badger. Silverstein always used to say that it was important for us to join enough of the dots in our advertising to avoid confusion (and as a result rejection), but to leave enough dots for the viewers or listeners to join for themselves. Into the gaps between the dots of advertising they should insert their own experience, hopes, fears, joys, and sorrows, and thus embrace the communication by becoming a part of it.

Excerpt from: Perfect Pitch: The Art of Selling Ideas and Winning New Business by Jon Steel

💎 On photos of people with dilated eyes are more attractive (but men are not sure why)

In a recent experiment, men were asked to rank how attractive they found photographs of different women’s faces. The photos were eight by ten inches, and showed women facing the camera or turned in three-quarter profile. Unbeknownst to the men, in half the photos the eyes of the women were dilated, and in the other half they were not. The men were consistently more attracted to the women with dilated eyes. Remarkably, the men had no insight into their decision making.

Excerpt from: Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain by David Eagleman

💎 On using unnecessarily complicated language looking stupid (not clever)

In a series of five studies, Oppenheimer systematically examined the complexity of the vocabulary used in various passages (including job applications, academic essays and translations of Descartes). He then asked people to read the samples and rate the intelligence of the person who allegedly wrote them. The simpler language resulted in significantly higher ratings of intelligence, showing that the unnecessary use of complex language sent out a bad impression.

Excerpt from: 59 Seconds: Think a little, change a lot by Richard Wiseman

💎 On our tendency to explain behaviour through personality rather than context (fundamental attribution error)

Fundamental attribution error was conducted in 1967 by Edward Jones and Victor Harris at Duke University. They had students read speech transcripts of debaters both in support of and in opposition to the political ideologies of Fidel Castro. (Today they might have used Osama bin Laden.) The students correctly attributed the speechwriter’s ideas as influenced by the speechwriter’s internal feelings when told the person who gave the speech had chosen his own position. If, for instance, the debaters said they disagreed with Castro, the students said they believed them. When the students were told the debater had no choice in the matter and was assigned the position as either pro- or anti-Castro, the students didn’t buy it. If the debater was assigned a pro-Castro position and then gave a pro-Castro speech, the students reading that speech told the researchers they thought the debater really believed what he or she was saying. The situation’s influence didn’t play into their assumptions; instead they saw all the debaters’ words as springing from their character.

Excerpt from: You Are Not So Smart: Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, Why You Have Too Many Friends On Facebook And 46 Other Ways You’re Deluding Yourself by David Mcraney

💎 On why brands need to make the best possible first impression (primacy error)

One of the first experiments on the topic was run in the USA by Solomon Asch. He asked subjects to evaluate a person simply on the basis of a list of six adjectives describing him. They might be told that he was ‘intelligent, industrious, impulsive critic, stubborn and envious’. Other subjects were given exactly the same six words but in the opposite order, ‘envious, stubborn, critical, impulsive, industrious and intelligent’. All subjects were then I asked to fill in a rating sheet in order to evaluate the person. For example, they had to indicate how happy they thought he was, how sociable he was, and so on. The subjects who heard the first list, which began with favourable adjectives evaluated the person considerably more highly than did those given the list beginning with the derogatory words. This effect – being more heavily influenced by early than by late item – is called the ‘primacy error’.

Excerpt from: Irrationality: The enemy within by Stuart Sutherland

💎 John Stingley on Copywriting

  • Pay careful attention to your first ideas. They are formed with the same innocence, naiveté and lack of jadedness that consumers have when first exposed to your advertising. There is value in that innocence and simplicity.
  • On the other hand, don’t stop too soon. Even if the essence of your first ideas is correct, explore every possible expression of that essence. Write every headline 100 different ways. Advertising is art, and like poetry, every comma will affect the balance of meaning.
  • Understand what the perceptions of your product are no. The current attitude of the consumer is the starting-point and the desired attitude is the finish line. Often, clients are reticent to admit what the current attitude towards them is. You have to make them understand. You can’t start a race in the middle.
  • Once you have placed yourself in the mind-set of the consumer, relax and be human. Don’t be afraid to think cynical thoughts or joke about the product as you work. I’ve found that a lot of great ideas started as jokes which, when explored, could be turned around to make a powerful, positive statement. Ideas that start this way have an honesty the consumer appreciates.

Excerpt from: D&Ad Copy Book by D&AD