Isolation Effect Read online Noah Kagan tested his book cover design by photoshopping the book onto shelves to see what stood out. The green cover isn't different, but it is distinct. In 1933, German researcher Hedwig Von Restorff¹ published a paper on memory and distinctiveness. She gave participants long lists of letter combinations to remember (e.g. JTSW, UCSM, PLST), but among them was a single number sequence: 9125. When participants returned after a distraction task, Hedwig found that...

Social Proof Read online "Window cleaning in progress" I love this board because it remembers something most marketers forget. A real photo taken on a suburban street in Houston. Cialdini proved that we're persuaded by others. In an Arizonan hotel room, he placed two messages on hotel doors designed to convince guests to reuse their towels. “Help us save the environment” = 35% towel reuse. “Most guests reuse their towels” = 44% towel reuse. We're persuaded by others' actions. So, if a...

Associative Learning Read online I'm reading The Expectation Effect. On page 52¹, there's a story that every marketer should read: The surgeon John Noland Mackenzie was among the first to test a negative expectation effect in medicine. Working at Baltimore's Eye, Ear and Throat Charity Hospital in the 1880s, he examined a 32-year-old woman with severe asthma and hay fever. When exposed to pollen, her nose and eyes would run and her throat would itch so badly she felt she must "tear [it] out...