Psychology

appeal to your customer’s meaning and purpose, or lack thereof You have seconds to appeal to self-interest, and it all happens with your headline.

Repetition is paramount.

• Consistency breeds familiarity, familiarity breeds confidence, and confidence breeds sales.

Some stories simply make you stop what you’re doing and consider them for a moment. Why? When you break it down, the “hmmm” factor can really be attributed to one thing: cognitive dissonance. Something challenges your assumptions, or it presents information in a way that doesn’t immediately make sense to you, and you find yourself going, “Hmmm, interesting.”

selling products in a way that the consumer sees the price increase with every bit of consumption causes the most pain.

you want to wake up your readers or listeners, substitute an unexpected word for the one their brains have already filled

• ex. Instead of "a stitch in time saves nine" say "a stitch in time saves money"
• The brain is constantly predicting and comparing. Providing it with something other than what it predicted will cause them to react

People are good at telling you their feelings. But they’re less dependable at reporting their habits (particularly their bad habits) or projecting their future wants and needs.

MAYA (Most Advanced Yet Acceptable)

• People gravitate to products that are bold, yet instantly comprehensible people actually prefer complexity—up to the point that they stop understanding something.
• The consumer is influenced in his choice of styling by two opposing factors:
  • attraction to the new
  • resistance to the unfamiliar
• When resistance to the unfamiliar reaches the threshold of a shock-zone and resistance to buying sets in, the design in question has reached its MAYA stage
• “An artwork doesn’t have to be ‘easy’ to appeal to its audience.”
  • People like a challenge if they think they can solve it.
• A good headline is not overly familiar, but rather familiar enough; a welcome surprise expressed in the vernacular of its intended audience; a promise to advance understanding in a broadly acceptable subject
• To sell something familiar, make it surprising. To sell something surprising, make it familiar.
  • The most promising ideas begin from novelty and then add familiarity, which capitalizes on the mere exposure effect