Do NOT CLICK this article
People are bored of being sold to, try telling them to piss off.
Please stop reading this. Seriously. Stop.
A parent says “you're not allowed to eat the broccoli." I know you eat the broccoli. Don't lie.
I'll set the scene. Black Friday 2011, Patagonia, a full page in the New York Times: Don't Buy This Jacket. Revenue reportedly grew around 30% the following year. This didn't come as a surprise to the Patagonia team, they've been telling you to eat the broccoli long before we ever did.
Our best performing advert for Ocean Bottle was “£40 for a water bottle that is way too expensive” - said no OB customer ever. This ad alone roughly halved their CAC through social ads.
The Hans Brinker Budget Hotel in Amsterdam has spent nearly three decades advertising itself as the worst hotel in the world. Now with a door in every room. It can't get any worse. It is permanently full, largely with people who have read the ads and want to see if they're true. Three examples of reverse psychology working harder than your mum trying to get you to eat your vegetables.
You're still here?
In 1966 the psychologist Jack Brehm called it reactance: when a person feels their freedom to choose is being threatened, the natural response is to push back to restore it, often by doing the very thing they've been told not to. Tell someone they can't have something and the something gets more valuable. There's a second bit of 1966 psychology (must have been a good year!): Elliot Aronson found that competent people who make a small, visible blunder are liked more than competent people who don't. It's called the pratfall effect. The flaw is proof that the competence is real, because nobody would invent it.
Dark arts of psychology aside; I think the explanation is altogether simpler. Advertising is so endemic - we are sold to every second of every day - people find a relief from that dynamic so refreshing that they’ll much more readily choose or remember you. Increasingly standing out, or being remembered, is what delivers the outsized returns (if you’ve worked with us before I’m sure you’ve heard my schtick on this point ad nauseum).
Don't follow our advice
But if you wanted to, here's what we'd suggest:
Get silly with it: Laughter is the best medicine, lets up the dosage.
Who do you care about? The most effective sentence on a B2B homepage is often the disqualifying one. "If you have fewer than fifty engineers, don't bother." The people it excludes weren't buying; the people it includes now feel chosen. Qualification reads as confidence, and confidence is what a buyer is really trying to assess.
Get used to confessing: Pick the true thing your competitors would hide and lead with it. Slow to onboard because you do it properly. Expensive because you don't cut corners. Big enough to cover your needs, small enough to care (this one's a tag line in a current project).
FOMO is real: Do you think Rolex doesn't have the budget to make a few more watches a year and clear their waitlist?
Anyway, the other articles aren’t that good, so don’t bother reading on.
