What can velvety mashed potatoes teach us about business
This is long, feel free to skip.
Which would you enjoy more, velvety mashed potatoes or velvety mashed potatoes? Nobody has yet done a study on the effect of fonts on the taste of mashed potatoes, but a study has been done on the effects of font on attitudes toward preparing food. In that study participants were asked to read a recipe for creating a Japanese lunch dish, then to rate the amount of effort and skill they thought the recipe would require and how likely they were to prepare the dish at home. Subjects who were presented with the recipe in a difficult-to-read font rated the recipe as more difficult and said they were less likely to attempt to make the dish.
The researchers repeated the experiment, showing other subjects a one-page description of an exercise routine instead of a recipe, and found similar results: subjects rated the exercise as harder and said there were less likely to try it when the instructions were printed in a font that was hard to read. Psychologists call this the “fluency effect.” If the form of information is difficult to assimilate, that affects our judgments about the substance of that information.
That’s Leonard Mladinow talking in his new book titled Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior. The book is an absorbing read and eye-opening examination of how the unconscious mind shapes our experience of the world.
My 2¢:
People think with their eyes.
And that’s why you need to make sure that your customer touch points are visually attractive.
Your customer touch points are the places where customers experience your business.
When you realize that marketing not only can but does occur (whether you like it or not) at every touchpoint with your customers, your mind suddenly opens up to some interesting possibilities.