"Cognitive fluency" is a measure of how easy it is to think about something. Psychologists have found that it quietly shapes your beliefs, how you invest, and what you buy. It even influences who and what you find beautiful, including the faces you think are attractive.
It has been called one of the hottest topics in psychology, as journalist Drake Bennett wrote in The Boston Globe, and it has a great deal to do with how customers respond to your business.
So how can cognitive fluency help your business? In plenty of ways. The bottom line: the more you build cognitive fluency into your business and your marketing, the more profitable your company can become.
People Like Things Easy
It's no secret that people like things easy. What's newer is that psychologists can now explain why. You don't need to worry about the "why," though. What matters is how you can make things easy within your business, because that is the key to increasing your profitability.
Imagine telling your investors that your strategy for higher profits, market capitalization, and stock price is to make things easy for your customers to think about. It sounds almost too simple, and yet the research keeps backing it up. As Adam Alter, a psychologist at New York University's Stern School of Business, put it:
"Every purchase you make, every interaction you have, every judgment you make can be put along a continuum from fluent to disfluent."
So how easy is it for your customers to buy your products and services? Much of the answer is in the content of your marketing.
How Easy Is Your Name?
The easier it is to pronounce the name of your company, product, or service, the more profitable your company can be. The same goes for presenting that name in an easy-to-read font, and even for your slogans. Adding rhyme or alliteration to a slogan, for instance, makes it easier to understand and remember.
How well do you think a company would do under the name Ralph Lifshitz? Or "Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web"? What about Lawrence Harvey Zeiger, or Demetria Gene Guynes?
Those are the original names of Ralph Lauren, Yahoo!, Larry King, and Demi Moore, all of them highly successful brands and household names. Each one became a little easier to say, spell, and remember along the way. You may not need to rename your business, but it's worth asking whether your name, and the names of your products, are as easy to say and recall as they could be.
How Easy Is Your Marketing Communication?
The ease with which your audience can take in your marketing has a direct line to your sales and profits. The simpler it is to understand, the more likely people are to buy. So make your website, emails, ads, and every other piece of communication easier to read and absorb.
Your Website
Your website is often the first place customers go to learn about you, so it's worth making the content effortless to read. A few ways to raise its fluency:
- Use clear, bold headlines and descriptive subheads so people can scan.
- Set a comfortable body font size (16 pixels or larger) in a clean, readable typeface, with generous line spacing.
- Keep your lines of text from running too wide. Around 50 to 75 characters per line reads best, which is why newspapers use narrow columns. So should you.
- Make sure your most important message, and a clear next step, are visible early. People do scroll now, so you don't have to cram everything "above the fold," but your core value proposition should land fast.
- Remember that less is more. People scan rather than read, so keep paragraphs short and lean on headings and bullet points.
- Use large, obvious buttons for the actions you want people to take.
- Choose strong color contrast between text and background so the words are easy on the eyes.
- Keep photos, illustrations, and colors attractive, and the overall layout simple and uncluttered.
Don't Forget Mobile
Most people will meet your brand on a phone, not a desktop, and a cramped mobile experience is about as disfluent as it gets. Make sure your site is responsive, so text, images, and buttons resize cleanly to fit any screen. Keep tap targets big enough for a thumb, and confirm your pages load quickly, since a slow page feels difficult before a visitor has read a single word. The easier your site is to use on a small screen, the more fluent, and trustworthy, your brand feels.
People can get dozens of emails a day, so yours has to be easy to open and easy to read. A few ways to help it stand out:
- Write a clear, compelling subject line that tells the reader what's inside.
- Use a comfortable, large-enough font and plenty of white space.
- Keep your lines of text short. Roughly 50 to 60 characters reads well on most screens.
- Keep the message itself short, under 1,000 words and ideally under 700, with one clear call to action.
Advertising
Advertising is often how people first meet your brand, so you want to leave a strong impression the very first time. The way to do that is with a simple message and a memorable tagline. Allstate is a classic example: after showing a disaster that could happen to you, the ad reassures you that Allstate will be there, and closes with a line you don't forget:
"You're in good hands with Allstate."
The same principle carries straight into digital ads, where you have even less room and less of someone's attention. Lead with one clear benefit, keep the wording plain, and make sure the page people land on repeats the same message and look as the ad that brought them there. That consistency, sometimes called message match, keeps the experience fluent from click to conversion.
A general rule in marketing is to say it once, and then say it again. Repetition strengthens understanding and memory, and it builds trust.
Your Bottom Line
The bottom line is simple: the easier your marketing is to understand, the easier it is for customers to buy from you. So make things clear and make them simple, and your customers will reward you for it.
Want a fresh set of eyes on how easy your website, emails, and ads are to read and act on? Contact our team and we'll help you put cognitive fluency to work for your bottom line.
This is part of our guide to marketing your small business online.
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