‘Psyched’ is your monthly insight into the psychology and social science that guide our everyday choices. Authored by Summer Treseder, a strategist at Initiative, ‘Psyched’ unpacks the ‘why’ behind consumer choices with each edition delving into a provocative topic. From exploring ‘the rational reasons why Karens exist’, and dissecting ‘why mascots matter’ to examining our obsession with ‘brand trainwrecks’, no subject is off limits.
To kick off: Does simplifying the ad experience or creating friction drive better results?
Much like everyone else, my LinkedIn feed has been inundated with the latest Specsavers airport ads. Deliberately designed to create a double take, the ads are skilfully simple and easy to get but at the same require more thought than most consumers are used to; so, it got me thinking…
This is a duality to seamless and idiotproof marketing which has effectively become a nonnegotiable for modern marketers. And it’s no surprise, with people seeing 6,000-10,000 ads daily, engaging with ads and making purchases now requires minimal effort thanks to the increasing ubiquity of shoppable formats and one-click buying.
But the question marketers and agencies need to ask ourselves is whether frictionless advertising experiences are helping our brands?
I thought I would solve this with a healthy debate:
The Affirmative: Team Effort Aversion
Effort aversion is an idea guided by the cognitive miser theory that suggest humans naturally aim to conserve resources to avoid effort-intensive tasks unless necessary.
This is especially true today as processes get faster, consumption gets easier, and people get more impatient. According to McKinsey, two-thirds of the decisions customers make are influenced by the quality of their experiences throughout their journey.
Strategies such as social commerce integrations, personalised recommendations, mobile-optimised ads, and AI customer service are increasingly becoming commonplace as markers aim to make consumer journeys as frictionless as possible.
Even the perception of making a process easier is enough. Take Houston airport as an example, which addressed customers’ complaining about long baggage claim waits by relocating the carousels so that travellers had to walk further to reach it. This reduced their waiting time at the carousel by 7 minutes but the same time overall, showing how perceived friction reduction increases user experience.
What does this mean for advertising?
- Explore opportunities to alleviate customer tensions such as personalised content, voice commerce and shoppable ad formats.
- Increase perceptions that a process in simple, even if it isn’t. Tactics include built -in content or load bars, autofill suggestions, time estimates, clear CTAs and social testimonials talking to simplicity.
The Opposition: Team Effort Justification
While the affirmative has presented their argument for effort aversion, effort justification claims that people tend to value an outcome if they put effort into attaining it, even if the outcome is less than expected.
As marketers we’re often so worried that consumers will not understand a message at the detriment of respecting their ability to fill in the blanks.
However, the information gap theory proves that curiosity and attachment are established when individuals actively bridge an information gap, with studies showing they are 20-30% more likely to remember the solution than when it’s simply provided.
The second argument is that overly seamless consumer journeys can lead to the perception that nothing is truly perfect, which creates doubt around a brands quality. As scams have increasingly become more sophisticated this scepticism has only intensified.
Value in fact can be created with friction. This can be applied across several areas, including UX design, messaging, and product experience:
- IKEA is a great example of how requiring customers to assemble their own furniture boosts the perceived value of its products through leveraging the effort they invest (The Ikea Effect).
- Meta found that their quick load time of privacy and security settings didn’t feel thorough enough, so they added a delay and a fake progress bar to improve user perception of the thoroughness.
- When the Coinstar machine was introduced, it could count coins instantly, but designers added a delay to build trust as consumers doubted its reliability.
- Friction can also be used to make people more conscious. For example, ATMs changed their process to return cards before dispensing money to prevent people from forgetting their cards.
What does this mean for advertising?
Play into consumers’ natural curiosity through creating gaps in information to incite engagement, attachment and memory encoding.
Create a sense of effort or challenge across media (e.g., gamified experiences, limited-edition item) and the user experience (e.g. leverage the information gap) to increase perceived value.
The verdict?
So, should I make all my ads harder for my customers? Not exactly
If you’re like me – extremely competitive – you might see this as a cop-out.
But both extremes, too much effort or not enough friction can lead to customer drop off.
The effort has to justify the value.
When it comes to marketing, we need to minimise the cognitive load on users through removing unwanted friction such as excessive steps, overwhelming decisions or too much information.
At the same time, friction can used in marketing to increase brand value, improve recall, or drive attachment.
So, the next time you’re planning a campaign, ask yourself: Does the effort we’re asking of our customer align with the perceived value we’re delivery?
