Phil Agnew (17:43)
Well, I prefer the first one because that's what you see. Yeah. Interesting. Cialini shares that this simple experiment was conducted on a much larger group. It was conducted on a group of Milwaukee women and the exact same thing happened with them. Close friends and family prefer the true image, but the Milwaukee women preferred the reverse image. Why? Well, it's because we respond favorably to the more familiar face. And your friends and family? My wife, she sees the real one, but I see the one transposed in the mirror every day, so I prefer that. The researchers titled this study Reverse Facial Images and the Mere Exposure Hypothesis. And mere exposure, I think, is a key principle that marketers need to remember if they want to benefit from from liking. Now, I've spoken about mere exposure before on the podcast, but for those new or those who need a refresher, the phenomenon was first publicised by Polish psychologist Robert Zajonx. His 1969 study found that if you're more exposed to a stimulus like an ad, an idea or a name, the warmer you will feel towards it, and the warmer you feel towards it, the more likely you are to believe it's true. He coined the term the mere exposure effect. To prove his point, he created two adverts and displayed them in two widely read campus newspapers in Michigan University where he was working. The ads featured Turkish words and very few Michigan students spoke Turkish. So almost every viewer who saw these ads were totally unfamiliar with these words and basically found them to be meaningless. He then asked over 1,100 students to rate 12 unfamiliar Turkish words. Specifically, he said, we would like you to give us an impression of each of these words. Of course, we realise that you could not reasonably guess the exact meanings. It would be sufficient for our purposes, however, if you simply estimate whether a particular word means something good or something bad. Some of the words were the ones that had been publicised on the ads on these newspapers around the campus. Other words were brand new. The students had never seen them before, and it turns out the students dramatically preferred the words they'd seen before. They rated them as 9.5% better or good words if they had been exposed to them before. Noella Walsh, who writes about this phenomenon in her book Tune in puts it simply. She says, we vote for the politician, select the dentist, pick a movie, order a wine or buy a brand that sounds familiar and towards which we have developed an inexpensive, inexplicable warmth, even if it's not the best choice in influence. Cialdini links this with marketing. He writes, often we don't realise our attitude towards something has been influenced by the number of times we've been exposed to it. For example, in a study on online advertising, banner ads for a camera were flashed 5 times or 20 times, or not at all on the top of an article participants were reading. The more frequently the ad appeared, the more participants came to like the camera, even though they were not aware of seeing the ads for it. The implications for marketers, I think, are quite obvious. Generating favorable views for your brand, product and service is surprisingly easy. Expose your customer to your message repeatedly. And I think there's a very important lesson from that 2007 study on Banner ads. And I think it's a lesson that most marketers forget. See, when I tell marketers about this mere exposure effect, they agree with it, but they assume there's a limit. They think mere exposure works, but only up until a point. Eventually, customers will bore of my message, eventually they'll tire out of the exposure and eventually it'll wear out. But that's not really what that 2007 study found. In fact, they found that exposing website visitors to the Same banner ad 20 times didn't wear out the effect at all. Instead, seeing the ad 20 times made the viewers more favourable than those who saw it five times. I think as marketers, we overestimate how salient and impactful our message is. We think that we can't possibly say the same things 20 times. Surely customers will get bored. And yet, for customers, our brands and products are a tiny part of their daily lives. They hardly pay attention to any message and repeat exposure is absolutely necessary. All too often, we change our key message, our branding, our design and our campaigns because we think customers have got bored. What the mere exposure effect suggests is that it's rarely the case. In reality, customers need to be exposed to your campaigns far more than you'd expect. The more we see something, the more familiar it becomes. The more familiar it becomes, the more we like it. The more we like it, the more we buy it. And this works with brands, but it also works with people. In 1987, researcher Bornstein gathered a group of participants in a dark room. Here, several faces flashed up on screen so quickly that the Participants exposed to the faces of couldn't actually recall having seen them. So they flash a face that sort of blinds them in the eye and then they show them the same face again. They say, have you seen this face or this face? And they can't accurately recall it. Yet the more frequently a person's face was flashed up on screen, the more these subjects came to like that person when they actually met them in a subsequent interaction. Cialdini writes that seeing the face more times led to greater social influence. He says the subjects were also more persuaded by the opinion statements of the individuals whose faces that have appeared on screen most frequently. Essentially, they liked him far more. To finish, I want to share a story that I first wrote about in the Nudge newsletter. It's about Thomas Edison and the first light bulb. Now, Edison originally struggled to sell the first electric light bulb. It sounds crazy today, we know how wonderful they are. But he struggled to sell it. People were scared of new technology, but Edison knew something quite smart. He instinctively knew that people were scared of inventions that they weren't familiar with. So to ease this fear, he leveraged the mirror exposure effect and he made the light bulb seem more familiar. Specifically, he mimicked the common gas lighting of the time. So he altered his electric lights to make them a similar brightness to gas lamps. He also ran electric cables underground, even though he didn't need to. This was to replicate what gas pipes did. But my favourite addition Edison made was that he added light shades. Now, light shades are necessary on a gas light and it's to stop them flickering or going out in a draft. But they're unnecessary for electric bulbs. Electric bulbs don't need light shades. They won't go out if there's a breeze. And yet this worked. It made people more familiar with them. It made them look more normal and made the electric light bulb more successful. So the light shades you see on your table lamp today are there because of mere exposure. They didn't need those shades. And yet Edison chose to replicate this largely irrelevant feature to benefit from the mirror exposure effect. He replicated how the traditional gas glass lights looked, making 19th century buyers more familiar with the look. And because the light bulb looked more familiar, they liked it more. And because they liked it more, they were more likely to buy the light that is probably lighting the room you're in right now. If you are in a room looks the way it does due to the mere exposure effect. And that is all for today's episode of Nudge, folks. Massive thank you to the absolutely fantastic Dr. Robert Cialdini. For joining me again on today's episode of Of Nudge. Not only do I highly recommend Cialdini's books, I also recommend the training he does with the Cialdini institute. Head to cialdini.com that's cialdini.com to learn more about his training. We've covered two important principles on the show today, liking and the mirror exposure effect. Now, I imagine many of you listening will want to apply these principles to your work. You won't just want to hear about the mirror exposure effect. You'll want advice and evidence that you can use to apply it in your day job. Well, if you do, then you might be interested in the Nudge Vaults, my new product. It is a database of 452 insights I've spent the last six years collecting. In there you will find 28 insights specifically about mere exposure and liking. And you'll find 60 different ideas for those 28 insights explaining how you can apply those principles. I gave Jacob Harris, the marketing lead lead at Good Gym, access to the Nudge vaults and asked him to use the vaults to improve his marketing. Here's what he said after using it.
