Beware: Marketers Know Difficult Decisions Are More Satisfying
Just when you thought marketing couldn’t get any more manipulative there’s this.
When was the last time you bought something after giving it a lot of thought?
Were you glad you took your time to really weigh the information?
Well, you might not have been as thorough as you thought.
Research out of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute shows that you might have just thought you did the work.
A new study found that difficulty processing information in an ad changes a person’s perception of the product.
What does this mean to you?
It means that popular textbook marketing advice might be wrong.
Instead of making the message as easy as possible to process, it might be better, in the long run, to make it more complicated.
Researchers found using a difficult font or creating an ad that was harder to process had an unexpected consequence. It caused people to be happier with their purchases over time.
It seems that this approach tricks the brain into thinking that the time spent processing the message was actually time spent understanding and researching the product.
