Availability Bias: Now you can Trick this cognitive shortcut to work for your brand!
It's already there! Why not use it to build your business!
Welcome to the 12th Issue of The Funnel Chemistry!
I really can’t believe that we are already through most of March! Summer is upon us and all the soft drinks and ice-cream ads are being taken out of the closet, dusted and aired as if those are the only things that can save us from the onslaught of heat.
What are your plans to make the most of this summer? Hit Reply to share with me!
This email has 1600+ words and would take 6.5 Minutes of your time
Background
Usually we humans think that we are objective rational beings! Well, it turns out that we may not be as objective as we believe we are. Consider this.
I recently bought a porcelain coffee mug! The instance I brought it home my instructions to my mom were “Please soak this in warm water before you pour me out a hot cup of coffee. It might break otherwise!” I was a little anxious that the cup might break because of a recent incident. Three months ago, my sister-in-law was pouring out a hot cup of coffee for me in a brand new mug and it cracked. The memory was so vivid that I thought caution was due!
At that time this seemed perfectly rational. But lets look at the facts. I have been using porcelain cups and mugs since I was about 14 years old. So far I have used more than 20 porcelain cups and mugs. The only time I saw a porcelain mug cracking up was three months ago! So, with this approximate data, the odds that a mug would crack up is 1 in 20. That is 0.5% or less!
If these odds hold, in the rest of my life time I might see another one or maximum two cups cracking up this way! But yet, there goes the caution! Now, is that so rational?
The question is why couldn’t I think of all this earlier? Why does it take effort to recall the actual objective facts and act based on them?
The answer lies in the way human brains are designed.
Availability Bias
Our brains are designed to conserve energy! Did you know that even though the brain takes up only 2% of the entire body’s weight, it uses up a minimum of 20% of the body’s energy? Well, then it better be goddamn efficient, isn’t it?
The simplest way for these amazing organs to minimize their energy usage is to rely on short-cuts that enable fast and almost accurate decisions! These shortcuts are called Heuristics. Simply put they are rules of thumb developed based on experience.
One such heuristic is the Availability Heuristic. Here is what Wikipedia has to say about it:
The availability heuristic, also known as availability bias, is a mental shortcut that relies on immediate examples that come to a given person's mind when evaluating a specific topic, concept, method or decision. The availability heuristic operates on the notion that if something can be recalled, it must be important, or at least more important than alternative solutions which are not as readily recalled.
Subsequently, under the availability heuristic, people tend to heavily weigh their judgments toward more recent information, making new opinions biased toward that latest news.
Since long, Marketers have worked on what is known as Top of Mind Recall. To be more specific, brands want to be remembered at the point of purchase. If you don’t recall the value provided by a brand when you are making a purchase, it is likely that you might actually not purchase it at all. The presence of Availability Bias justifies this effort.
As a result, brands reach out to their customers via multiple touchpoints. For example, a brand like Orbit (Chewing Gum) would advertise on TV, reach out to customers on social media, send SMS to remind how good their gum tastes and may have a prominent slot just next to the billing counter so that you could pick it up on your way out! This entire effort is necessary to keep the gum on top of mind of the consumer!
I am sure that with the available tech, you can think of creative ways of getting your brand to reach out to their customers/prospects through multiple touch points and build top of mind recall. But there is more to this! Here is my sketch note on the subject!
You can download the PDF version of this here.
Deepening The Concept!
Here are 4 articles that delve deeper into this concept. This is a technical subject. Many articles that I read take up a technical treatment. Needless to say, they are almost unreadable except by a few scholars on the subject. However, I have made a careful selection of articles that make it simple and easy to understand.
Why do we tend to think that things that happened recently are more likely to happen again?
This article from The Decision Labs is a technical treatment of the subject, but explores two applications and has notes on how to avoid this when making important decisions.
Availability Heuristic Marketing
This is a short article that explores the application of Availability Bias in Marketing. You can read this to understand how you can apply this concept to position your product/service as a solution to a consumption problem.
The Availability Heuristic and Marketing
Why do lottery apps and gambling dens showcase their winners all the time? How can news make you think that a given issue is more serious than it actually is? The answer to these two questions is again Availability Bias. This article explains how you can use the availability heuristic to drive sales by anticipating and negating objections and how stories are more powerful than facts.
Cognitive Biases — Availability heuristic
While exploring the mechanics of the heuristic and explaining how it works, this article also shows how you can design better products and services to make the most of this bias!
How to use this concept
There’s a simple way to remember why this bias is important. It is in this equation.
Repetition —> Recall —> Sales
But, I won’t recommend mindless repetition of the same communication. You have to understand repetition here as reaching out to your target audience through multiple touch points. Here’s how you can create something wonderful that will lead to availability bias and will boost your sales.
Tip#1: Map out your consumer’s journey and see how you can create memorable experiences.
For example, if someone is visiting your website, can you design a stunning landing page? Can you create a memorable exit? What technology can you use to do this?
Another example. If you use LinkedIn/Instagram for personal branding, think of how you can present exclusive content so that your followers begin their day in a memorable manner. What time can you post first in the day so that your target audience sees your posts first thing in the morning? You can also publish a digest of your best performing posts with some wonderful comments and conversations at the end of week!
Key here is to visualize the journey and designing your communication strategy such that you can create the best experiences which create and aid recall of your brand.
Tip#2: Try and build top of the mind recall! If not at least build aided recall!
Imagine this. Your spouse asked you to buy soap and you aren’t aware of the regular brand they buy! You go to the outlet in the mall nearby and start browsing the brands. Guess which brand you would land up buying? The brand that sound familiar or the brand that you regularly use! Availability bias tells me that you will buy whatever you recall when you see the soap brands on display. That is how aided recall works! It will make you think of familiar products as favorable than those that you are seeing for the first time.
Tip#3: Tell compelling stories about your brand!
Stories have a higher recall value than facts. Many times, I used to tell a story to my students in class to explain a concept. They would remember the story better than the concept! I used to joke about it in my classes, then. But now I have learnt that stories are far more powerful than we think.
Creating and sharing powerful stories around your brand improves recall and hence favorably primes your target audience at the point of purchase. This aids conversions without a doubt.
Next Steps
All this knowledge would be really useless if you simply read and forget it. Take time to think through the above tips and see what you can do about them. If you are unable to figure that out, remember that I am a mail away. Hit that reply button and start a conversation with me. I would love to help!
Did you like this post, then share it with your friends! They may benefit from this as you did too.
Is this your first time reading this? If you haven’t already, I recommend that you subscribe to The Funnel Chemistry and not miss an update!
Do you like The Funnel Chemistry? Please feel free to share it with friends. The more you share it, the more motivation I will have to share more! Please do help.
Well! Those are the words for this week. See you in the next Thursday right here in your inbox!
One of the key takeaways that was not really emphasized in this piece is that "Repetition is the basis for recall!" If you think your advertising and promotion will work when you do it just once, that is not going to cut it. You must repeat your ad to the same target audience so that recall is built!