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Your hiring process is losing you the best candidatesNew
Learn the seven essential recruitment lessons from Futura Talent founder Guy Allen on how to avoid hiring traps.
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Our advice 9

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Blog Attract 10 min read

Honest marketing persuades better: 10 biases that prove it

Sarah Impey Marketing Director and Consultant

The most persuasive marketing tends to be the most honest. Yeah, I know, this sounds like something off a mug. But the psychology really does back it up.

Contents

Most lists of "biases for marketers" lean on the same handful of tricks: fake countdown timers, "only 2 left!", a silly decoy price to make the real one look sensible. They work for a while, then people learn to spot them and they stop trusting the brands that use them.

The ten below are different. Each comes from a real study, and you can use every one of them honestly.

So here are my secret weapons of mass marketing production.

1. Admit a flaw and people like you more (the Pratfall Effect)

In 1966, psychologist Elliot Aronson played students a tape of someone trying out for College Bowl, an American TV quiz where university teams competed against each other. The "candidate" was an actor, and he aced it, getting 92% of the questions right. In one version of the tape, he then knocked a cup of coffee all over himself. Students who heard the clumsy version liked him more.

One small slip made him seem more human.

There was a twist (there always is one in a good story). When the actor only got 30% right, spilling the coffee made people like him less. So a flaw only helps once you've shown you're good at the thing that matters.

We've seen tech companies do something like this in their live webinars. They plant a tiny bug in the demo so the presenter can fix it on the spot. Nothing too serious. It just lets the audience see a human team that knows what it's doing.

That doesn't give you a free pass to make mistakes, though. When Meta's new smart glasses failed twice during its 2025 launch, the glitch was in the very thing it was selling, and the coverage was brutal.

2. Show the work, and it's worth more (the labour illusion)

Harvard's Ryan Buell and Michael Norton tested travel and dating websites. Some returned results instantly. Others made people wait while showing what they were doing (think "searching airlines..."). People often preferred the slower sites, even though the results were identical.

I will caveat this. Times have changed, and the audience's attention span and patience have dwindled. But the lesson here is still valid.

We judge value partly by effort.

Anyone who's hired a freelancer, or been one, will know this question: "Why am I paying that much for a logo that only took you two days?"

On paper, it's an unfair thing to ask. The designer spent ten years getting good enough to do it in two days, and that experience is what you're paying for.

But the feeling... The feeling behind it is real. When something turns up quickly, people feel a bit short-changed. They start wondering whether you really thought about it, and whether they can trust it. We’ve all been to a Chinese restaurant where the Chow Mein came out a little too fast. Sure, you know they’ve just been clever and made a big pot. But it’s still a tad suspicious.

This one needs testing. There's a fine line between showing your effort and annoying people because they had to wait. Show the work, and keep the wait short.

3. Let people build it and they'll love it (the IKEA effect)

When my father-in-law came round one evening, he complimented our new dining room table. I felt pretty good about this, and my immediate reply was: "Thanks, I built this by myself. Even though the instructions said it needed two people." (Small humble brag: I should update my CV with this accomplishment.)

Turns out there's a study for that.

Harvard's Michael Norton and his colleagues gave some people a flat-pack IKEA storage box to build. Others were shown the exact same box, already put together. When asked what they'd pay for it, the people who'd built their own box offered more.

They ran the same test with origami and Lego. People rated their own clumsy origami almost as highly as pieces made by experts, and expected everyone else to agree with them.

That said, there was one condition. If people didn't finish the job, or built something and then had to take it apart, the extra love disappeared.

Basically, people get attached to things they've had a hand in. I value that table far more because I built it.

4. Give a reason, even a small one (the "because" effect)

In 1978, Ellen Langer's team at Harvard asked to jump the queue for a library photocopier. With no reason, 60% of people let them. Adding "because I'm in a rush" took it to 94%. Oddly, "because I have to make copies", which explains nothing, got 93%.

Before you rush to stick "because" on everything, look at the second half of the study. When the request was 20 pages rather than five, only the real reason worked. Small asks get waved through. Bigger ones get thought about.

This is an easy bias to add to your business. Every time you ask someone to do something, tell them why. "Leave us a review; it really helps a small team like ours" beats "Leave us a review". And the bigger the ask, the better the reason needs to be.

5. If it's easy to say, it's easier to trust (processing fluency)

Princeton's Adam Alter and Daniel Oppenheimer looked at new shares on the stock market. Companies with easy names tended to do better in their first year than ones with names that tie your tongue in knots. Even pronounceable ticker codes (KAR rather than RDO) gave a small boost.

Our brains mistake "easy to process" for "probably true" or "probably good". Jargon works against you here, as do long sentences and product names that need explaining.

It goes well beyond names. In 2008, psychologists Hyunjin Song and Norbert Schwarz gave students an exercise routine to read. Some got it in plain Arial and some in a fussy brush-script font. The Arial group guessed the routine would take about 8 minutes. The brush-script group guessed 15, and they were less willing to try it. In another of their studies, people judged food additives with hard-to-say names as more risky.

If something's hard to read, people assume it'll be hard to do.

If your pricing page or proposal is more complicated than my (hypothetical) kids' homework, then I'm going to assume working with you will take effort too. Plain English makes you easier to buy from.

6. Rhymes sound right (the rhyme-as-reason effect)

This is fluency's cheekier cousin. Matthew McGlone and Jessica Tofighbakhsh showed people pairs of sayings with the same meaning, one rhyming and one not. Think "woes unite foes" against "woes unite enemies". People rated the rhyming versions as more accurate.

You'll find it all over advertising. "Beanz Meanz Heinz" and Pringles' "Once you pop, you can't stop" have both stuck around for decades. It's even turned up in court. In the 1995 O.J. Simpson trial, defence lawyer Johnnie Cochran told the jury, "If it doesn't fit, you must acquit."

There's a limit, though. The effect got weaker when people already had an opinion on what the saying claimed. A rhyme can win over someone who's undecided, but it won't change a mind that's already made up.

So a rhyme can make a tagline stick and feel true. Use one, maybe two. Any more than that and you're writing a greeting card.

7. You know too much to explain yourself well (the curse of knowledge)

This one's on you.

In 1990, Stanford PhD student Elizabeth Newton asked people to tap out the rhythm of a well-known song, like "Happy Birthday", for someone else to guess. The tappers expected a 50% hit rate. Out of 120 songs, listeners got three.

The tappers could hear the tune in their heads. The listeners heard knocking on a table.

Businesses do the same thing whenever they describe what they do. You know your service so well that your copy sounds like a symphony to you, but everybody else just hears random noise.

We've gone deeper into this one in Your customers can't hear the tune.

Test it for yourself. Get someone outside your industry to read your homepage and tell you what you do. Whatever they get wrong is what needs rewriting.

8. People finish what they've already started (the endowed progress effect)

Joseph Nunes and Xavier Drèze handed out 300 loyalty cards at a car wash. Half needed eight stamps for a free wash. The other half needed ten, but came with two stamps already on. Both groups had to buy eight washes. 34% of people with the head start claimed their free wash, against 19% of the others.

It helped when people were given a reason for the free stamps, even a flimsy one.

But why does it work? Well, obviously, people like free stuff. And the upfront reward feels closer, so you're more invested in finishing. A café study found the same thing: customers bought coffee more often as they neared a free drink, and those given bonus stamps got there faster.

If it suits your business, give new customers a head start, like a welcome bonus or a first session that ends with a quick win. They'll leave on a high, feeling they've already achieved something. So they'll more likely want to come back.

9. A new start makes people act (the fresh start effect)

Hengchen Dai, Katherine Milkman and Jason Riis found that Google searches for "diet", gym visits and goal sign-ups all go up after dates that feel like a new chapter. That means New Year, and also Mondays, the first of the month, birthdays and holidays.

There's a catch here too. A reset can put off people who were already doing well, because it wipes their progress. (I remember losing my PS2 save card after investing countless hours into an RPG that I didn't finish. I refused to pick up the game again.)

Next time you run a campaign, time it to a moment your audience sees as a fresh start, like a new quarter, a new financial year, or even after the Summer holidays. You don't have to wait for January.

10. People remember the best bit and the ending (the peak-end rule)

In 1993, Daniel Kahneman and colleagues had people hold a hand in painfully cold water for 60 seconds. In a second round, they did the same 60 seconds, then kept their hand in for another 30 while the water warmed by about a degree. Asked which they'd rather repeat, most picked the longer one. It hurt for longer but ended a bit better.

It's worth knowing that a 2022 review of 174 studies backed the rule, but found the overall average of an experience predicts how people rate it just as well. Endings matter. But the middle does still count.

This works for clients, but also for motivating your team. Don't let projects just stop. A wrap-up call, a short summary of what changed, or a handwritten note leaves everyone with a better memory of the work.

What they have in common

Not one of these needs a trick. People trust businesses that own up to their weak spots and explain themselves in plain words.

Most of your competitors are busy sounding polished and saying the same things. Being a bit more honest is one of the easiest ways to stand out from them. Pick one bias from this list, try it on a page or an email this week, and see what happens. And cut out the cheap tricks.

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