What we notice, remember and buy is shaped by all kinds of psychological effects
Mia Feilman: Hm. Most marketing has the shelf life of a trending sound. This is Got Marketing, where we unpack campaigns, marketing news and what actually sticks. Hello, friend, and welcome back to Got Marketing. We like to think we're rational consumers. We compare options, we weigh up the pros and cons, then we make a sensible decision. Except that's not really how people work. What we notice, remember and buy is shaped by all kinds of psychological effects. Most of the time, we don't even realise they're operating in the background. So today I'm looking at five behavioural psychology effects that. That marketers should understand. Not because we want to manipulate people and not because psychology is a collection of tricks that force people to buy things. It doesn't work like that. Behavioural psychology helps us understand how people actually make buying decisions. What gets their attention, what they remember, what motivates them, what helps them understand an offer and what makes a brand feel trustworthy. So let's start with familiarity. The mere exposure effect is our tendency to develop a preference for things because we've already seen them before. Repeated exposure to something creates familiarity and familiarity can make something feel safer and easier to choose. This matters because customers aren't carefully researching every single brand in the category. Most of us are, uh, using mental shortcuts. Do I recognise this brand? Have I seen it before? Does it feel familiar? Does it come to mind when I need something? This is pretty much the premise of Byron Sharp's work. In his most epic book, How Brands Grow, Sharpe argues that brands grow by reaching more buyers. And to do that, they need physical availability and mental availability. Physical availability means being easy to find and buy, being stocked in the right places. Mental availability means being easy to think of in a buying situation. When I need glasses, which brands come to mind? When I want takeaway, which brands come to mind? When I need a marketer whose name do I remember? Advertising helps build that mental availability. It creates and refreshes memory. That is why consistency matters. But consistency doesn't mean posting every day. It means repeatedly linking your brand to the same recognisable ideas. You're teaching people what to remember you for, like I'm teaching people to remember me for campaigns. A, um, great example is Specsavers. Should have gone to. Specsavers has been around for more than 20 years and the idea is so simple. Something has gone terribly wrong because someone couldn't see properly. And then we get the line. Should have gone to Specsavers. But Specsavers hasn't run the same advertising for 20 years. It has returned to the same idea in different ways. Different storeys, different iterations, different characters, different formats. But the core idea stays the same. And that's what we need. Repetition, but with creative variation, should have gone to specsavers. The problem is that marketers often get bored long before customers do. You've been staring at the campaign for weeks. You've discussed the strategy, you've reviewed the copy, you've looked at four versions of the artwork and of course you're sick of it. But the customer saw one post while waiting in the school pickup line. You are not the customer. Every time you change your positioning because you're bored, you risk resetting the customer's memory. So familiarity has enormous value. But familiarity alone isn't enough because we also remember what stands out. So this leads us to the second effect, which, which is called the von Restorff effect, also known as the isolation effect. It means that when one thing is different to everything around it, we're more likely to remember it. For example, imagine a page of writing in black text and one word is printed in red. You're going to remember the red word, right? Because it broke a pattern. Now this creates an interesting tension for us marketers because people prefer what feels familiar, as we discussed, but they remember what feels different. And great brands do both. We can do hard things, friends. Great brands build familiar brand structures. Then they use those structures to deliver distinctive creative work, just like spec savers. Another great example of this is Cadbury's guerrilla campaign. Think about what chocolate advertising normally looks like, right? Melting chocolate, someone taking a bite, two people sitting on a couch about to watch a show. A slow motion shot of someone breaking a square apart. Instead, Cadbury gave us a gorilla playing the drums to Phil Collins. And for most of the campaign, there is no chocolate. Nobody eats anything, nobody explains the product. There's just a gorilla preparing to play the drum solo from in the Air Tonight. It behaved nothing like a normal chocolate ad, and that's why people remembered it. It broke a pattern. That doesn't mean that brands should be random for the sake of it. All right, so different isn't automatically good. You can get attention and still communicate absolutely nothing, I assure you. So the question isn't how can we make this more strange for the sake of being strange. It's a, uh, better question is how can we express this idea in a way that the category doesn't already own that's different to how other brands in this category behave? This is where many founder led brands struggle. They create a mood board using brands they Admire. And then they borrow the same colours, the same photography style, the same language, the same claims. And the result looks beautiful, it really does. But it also looks like everyone else. If every business in your category uses the same visual language and, and says the same things, you've made your competitors marketing indistinguishable from yours. So be familiar, but don't be forgettable. All right?
Effect number three, loss aversion. Losing a hundred dollars often feels worse than gaining $100
Effect number three, loss aversion. Uh, this is the idea that losses often feel more powerful than equivalent gains. Losing a hundred dollars often feels worse than gaining $100 feels good. This matters because most marketing focuses on, um, gains. Win more customers, save more time, grow your confidence, build your business. There's nothing wrong with that. But sometimes the stronger message is not what someone stands to gain, it's what they risk losing by doing nothing. And most campaigns fail because the easiest thing to do was nothing. So we really need to ask, what is the status quo costing them? What opportunity is the customer missing? What might disappear if they don't act? And WWF's last selfie campaign is a perfect example of this. The campaign used Snapchat. At the time, images on Snapchat disappeared after being viewed. WWF shared images of endangered animals and called them their last selfies. And then the images disappeared and the animals were also at risk of disappearing. So what I love about this is that the medium became the message. Instead of saying, help us protect endangered animals, the campaign showed us the loss. This could be the last image this species could disappear because this image is disappearing. That's so much more powerful than another general message about conservation. Right? The lesson isn't that we should terrify our customers and frighten them to death. Loss aversion is not a permission slip to manufacture panic. And if there are any gurus listening to this, please take note. It doesn't mean fake countdown timers, it doesn't mean invented scarcity. It doesn't mean telling people that their business will collapse if they don't buy your course at midnight. The loss has to be real, right? A, uh, strategist could say, build a more distinctive brand. Or they could ask how many good fit customers are, uh, overlooking you because they can't tell why you're different? That's the same offer with different framing. And good marketing often reveals the cost of doing nothing. And bad marketing invents that. Okay, number four, the concreteness effect. This explains why specific information is easier to understand and remember than abstract, vague, wishy washy information. Concrete language gives us something we can picture, actually visualise in our minds. Abstract language Makes us do more work and our brains are overloaded. But marketers, they love abstract language like transformation, empowerment, freedom, confidence, seamless solutions. Okay, but what does that actually look like on a Tuesday afternoon? And my absolute favourite example is Metro Trains Dumb Ways to Die campaign. Metro Trains could have said, exercise caution around railways, which is accurate, it's responsible and it is 100% forgettable. Instead, it created a song about dumb ways to die. Dumb ways to die. So many dumb ways to die. The campaign showed specific and ridiculous deaths. Setting fire to your hair, poking a grizzly bear, even though we don't have bears in Australia. Using your private parts as a piranha bait. Then it connected those ridiculous examples with dangerous behaviour around trains standing too close to the platform, driving around railway barriers, running across the track. The abstract message was be safe around trains. But the campaign made the message concrete. You could see it, you could sing it, you could remember it. This is one of the biggest problems in services marketing. Services are already intangible, okay? You can't hold strategy and, uh, financial advice in your hand. You can't try on consulting to see how it fits. You can't inspect mentoring from every angle. So the marketing has to make the outcome feel real. So let's compare this message. Feel more confident at work with this message. Share your idea in the meeting instead of typing it into a private document afterwards. Let's also compare. Create more freedom in your business with take a week off without checking slack from the hotel bathroom or improve your marketing consistency. And instead we can say, know what campaign you're running next month before you open canva. Specificity gives the brain something to hold onto. If I can't picture what you are promising me, you are asking my brain to do the marketing work for you. And my brain has other things to do. All right?
The pratful effect is the idea that a competent person can make mistakes
And our final effect is the pratful effect, which I've spoken about before, but I've got a different example for you today. The pratful effect is the idea that a competent person or brand can sometimes become more likeable after making a mistake. The word competent is really important here because flaws are not automatically charming. Okay? If someone is already seen as capable, a mistake can make them feel more human. Because humans are imperfect. This is why brands who profess to be perfect are not trustworthy. Because humans are not perfect. If a brand hasn't established some level of competence, the same mistake can make them just look really shitty at their jobs. Right? Let's look at an example. KFC's FCK campaign, I think is Nearly perfect for the prattful effect. In 2018, KFC ran out of chicken. Restaurants closed. Customers were furious and the storey spread because it was so absurd, right? A chicken restaurant with no chicken. KFC responded with a print ad. It showed the familiar recognisable striped KFC bucket, but the letters had been rearranged to read fck. Underneath was an apology. The brand didn't hide behind corporate language. It didn't say, due to unforeseen supply chain disruptions, yada yada, we have product availability issues, yada yada. It essentially said, we fucked up, we know this is ridiculous and we're really sorry. And it worked because people already trusted KFC to sell chicken. The shortage in this case was just an exception. It wasn't the rule. It wasn't what people normally expected from the brand. So a new restaurant opening for the first time and customers arrive and there's no food. That's not going to work. The Prattful effect isn't going to save them. Okay? That's a restaurant that forgot to order ingredients. Okay? So the Prattful effect is not permission to be shit at your job. You need the competence before the flaw becomes charming. But it does remind us that perfection isn't the way to build trust. Brands can become so polished that they stop feeling human. When every photograph is perfect, when every customer is delighted, when every launch sells out, when the founder wakes at 5am and drinks celery juice, it becomes very difficult to believe. A genuine apology and an admission that we screwed up builds humanity into a brand that is capable. And so imperfection can really humanise a credible brand, but it cannot replace credibility. So those are five behavioural psychology effects that change how people respond to marketing. The mere exposure effect shows us the value of familiarity. The von Restorff effect reminds us that familiar shouldn't mean forgettable or boring. Loss aversion helps explain why the cost of inaction can be so motivating. The concreteness effect shows us why specific language is easier to understand. And the Prattful effect reminds us that competent brands don't have to pretend that they're perfect. These effects are not buttons. You can't add one to a headline and automatically get a sale. They are lenses. They help us understand why some marketing is easier to notice and remember. And often several effects are working at once. Specsavers uses repetition, but the individual ads still use surprise. Dumb ways to die was concrete, but it was also distinctive. KFC's apology was human, but it also relied on familiar brand assets like the Bucket. These effects are ingredients in your marketing. Okay? They're not a recipe. The strategic work is knowing which effect matters and then working out how to turn it into a campaign that people will notice and take action with. Marketing isn't about putting more information into the world. It's about understanding how people actually make decisions. And people are not rational purchasing machines. We're distracted, we're emotional, we rely on shortcuts, and that's what makes us human.
Thanks for listening to Got Marketing. You listened all the way to the end
Thanks for listening to Got Marketing. If you enjoyed this episode, send it to another marketer who loves understanding why people buy. I'll see you next time. Thank you. You listened all the way to the end. If you're enjoying GoT marketing, make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss what's Next. Podcast reviews are like warm hugs and one of the best ways to support a small business. You can connect with me mia Feilman on LinkedIn and Instagram, and I always welcome your feedback and questions for future episodes.
