3BrainMarketing

Have you been grocery shopping, tried to buy high fiber, low sugar cereal only to get frustrated because there are so many options? So frustrated you buy pop-tarts instead – have it for breakfast, then feel guilty because you went off of your diet. You turn to food to treat your guilt. You have ice cream on your 4th pop-tart, get dressed for work in 7 mins. from the sugar rush (an improvement from the typical 37). You then fall asleep 20 mins. later from the sugar crash, not make it to work and get fired because it was your 2nd day.

Next day, pop-tarts again for breakfast (now because it’s cheap and being unemployed you’ve got to watch your budget). Your newfound and now despised routine is broken by the phone ringing – your doctor’s office calling with an appointment reminder. Two weeks later during your annual physical checkup, a blood test reveals that you’ve got diabetes. You’re now seeing a psychiatrist to deal with your fear of needles.

If I just described you – all your woe being a result of your inability to select a healthy cereal, you might have been a victim of poor Cognitive Fluency!

Ok so the story might be a bit of a stretch, but my goal was to introduce the concept of Cognitive Fluency, and by extension, seek out a support group of fellow unemployed, needle-fearing, diabetes having pop-tart eaters. Ok, so that might be a stretch to… but I did get frustrated in the cereal aisle!

Anyway, don’t go calling the cops just yet. Poor Cognitive Fluency is not a crime… (though it should be!.. for marketers anyway). Cognitive Fluency is essentially the measure of how easy it is to think about something. Studies indicate that if something is difficult to think about, we tend to reject it much quicker than if presented in simple terms.

Simple Is More Attractive Than Complex

A seemingly obvious statement but many companies fail miserably at instituting this principle. Present research is shedding new light on the consequences of complexity in the marketplace. Marketers, web developers, business owners, teachers, among others need be aware, as your attempts to provide as much information as possible, so the consumer might make an informed judgment may actually be driving those very customers away. In a study highlighted in the Boston Globe: Easy = True researchers noted:

Psychologists have determined, for example, that shares in companies with easy-to-pronounce names do indeed significantly outperform those with hard-to-pronounce names. Other studies have shown that when presenting people with a factual statement, manipulations that make the statement easier to mentally process – even totally nonsubstantive changes like writing it in a cleaner font or making it rhyme or simply repeating it – can alter people’s judgment of the truth of the statement, along with their evaluation of the intelligence of the statement’s author and their confidence in their own judgments and abilities.

So how does this apply to your marketing collateral? To your website? A lot of interactive marketers and site owners for example, afraid that visitors will abandon without navigating through their site, attempt to force fit as much information on their home page as possible – the common outcome – confusion, frustration, abandonment. If your visitor cannot interpret what your product or service is – and quickly, you’re likely to lose that visitor.

If in your advert, you are unable to outline your USP (unique selling proposition) in a clear, simple and straightforward manner – if not cognitively fluent – Mr. Marketer you are unlikely to grab attention and foster memory retention necessary for purchase. Thinking about using that fancy new font for the text on your website? According to the researchers:

One thing that fools us, for example, is font. When people read something in a difficult-to-read font, they unwittingly transfer that sense of difficulty onto the topic they’re reading about. Schwarz and his former student Hyunjin Song have found that when people read about an exercise regimen or a recipe in a less legible font, they tend to rate the exercise regimen more difficult and the recipe more complicated than if they read about them in a clearer font.

Nothing about the brain’s functioning is simple – but let’s simplify it anyway – it’s clear that purchase decisions are no rational act, all the bells and whistles on the iphone doesn’t sell the phone. In part, it’s their ability to shrink all those complicated features and express them Clear. Simple. Easy.

Below are a couple of TV commercials, see the Cognitive Fluency and lack thereof in each of them. When you’re done watching, turn off the monitor, throw out the pop-tart, get yourself some high-fiber cereal and lose some weight fatty!

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This article was written by Marc Narine.
Marc works with companies to elevate marketing performance and profitability by going beyond the feature/benefit approach to instead assessing the consumer’s emotional and cultural imprints and subconscious attachments to a product. He is the primary author at 3Brain Marketing.