Why Your New Ad May Be Hurting Your Brand

Are you trying to stand out from the constant slew of ads your customers see?

Do you try to be different? Do you try to be new to gain a competitive advantage? Are you using newness to be relevant?

Wanting to do something new is understandable. After all, just using the word new attracts customers’ attention.

Humans crave novelty.

When something is new, it triggers the production of the chemical dopamine. And, when dopamine increases, so does your motivation to act.¹

Biologically, this desire for newness comes from your instinct to survive. When humans were hunter-gatherers, new information could give new insight into how to survive.

Novelty is tied to learning to survive. That’s powerful stuff.

But, this same link between novelty and learning is what may be causing you to struggle with effective advertising. This struggle you face comes from three ways your customers’ minds work:

1. The mind is a story-taking machine. Stories are learning devices that give your customers information to help them make better decisions.²
2. The mind is a story-making machine. An image can trigger your customers’ minds to create their own stories about what that image means and how it relates to other stories they tell themselves.³
3. A brand is a recall device. Seeing a brand makes your customers recall all their associations with your brand — all the stories they tell themselves about your brand, what it stands for, and how it makes them feel.

Most commercial messages contain too many elements, all competing with one another for our understanding, and the elements themselves may be uninteresting, unclear, or off-message.

— Marty Neumeir⁴

So, when your customers encounter a novel image in your advertising, they are naturally driven to focus on it — because of that dopamine spike. They compare it to the stories they tell themselves about your brand. In doing so, they’re asking themselves, “Is it new? How does it fit into what I already know?

And, when the new idea doesn’t connect with what they recall about the brand, they’ll have an internal conflict about what your brand really does. They’ll wonder, “Has the brand changed? Was I duped before? Am I being duped now? What’s true about this brand? I’m so confused.”

Unfortunately, when grabbing attention with newness is the goal, new ideas don’t just happen once in an ad. They happen constantly.

That’s a lot of confusion.

When your customers are confused, they don’t know if your product solves their problem. And, they’ll look elsewhere when they don’t know if your product solves their problem. They won’t buy.

Novelty is a powerful tool, but it can also be a dangerous one.

Even if novelty increases your attention metrics, it can inhibit customers from purchasing if it confuses them.

The key is to use novelty to attract interest, but make sure it’s a new way of showing something you always stood for, the problems you always solved, and how you always made your customers feel.

Without that consistency, you’re just wasting your ad spend.

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Endnotes

1. Belle Beth Cooper, “Novelty and the Brain: Why New Things Make Us Feel So Good,” Lifehacker.com, 2013.
2. Robert McKee and Thomas Gerace, Storynomics: Story-Driven Marketing in the Post-Advertising World, 2018
3. Ibid.
4. Marty Neumeir, Zag: The Number One Strategy of High-Performance Brands, 2006.

Note: I get an affiliate commission for any book purchases on Amazon made through the links in the Endnotes.