18 Common Cognitive Biases That Can Affect Your Marketing
December 23, 2024 By Ashley Orndorff, aka Marketing Geek
Our brains and bodies are built to help us survive, but it’s also easy to fall back on mental shortcuts. Sometimes these are helpful and sometimes they aren’t, and they can affect everything including marketing your business. Whether you are marketing to your audience or analyzing your own efforts, here are some cognitive biases that can affect your marketing:
What is a Cognitive Bias?
As our brains attempt to interpret the information around us, they also try to simplify and categorize it. A cognitive bias is an unconscious error we make as our brains try to simplify and process the complex world and information around us. This could occur through the use of mental shortcuts, also known as heuristics, emotions, other social factors, and more.
Although there are some standard cognitive biases all humans are prone to, the specific results of them do vary from person to person because they are filtered through our own experiences; past and present. They affect our actions, the way we make decisions, the way we interact with others, and more.
18 Common Cognitive Biases That Can Affect Your Marketing
Although cognitive biases are often simplified as “unconscious errors in thinking” and can have negative consequences, they aren’t always negative things. A bias simply means a tendency to favor or lean towards a specific idea, person, group, thing, etc. When used ethically in marketing, cognitive biases can help encourage engagement or even perhaps a sale.
When strategizing or analyzing your own marketing efforts, there are also some cognitive biases that can affect you in those situations. Regardless, it’s good to be aware of them. Here are some common cognitive biases that can affect your marketing:
1. Confirmation Bias
Confirmation bias is one of the most common and well-known cognitive biases. Confirmation bias refers to our tendency to seek out and remember information that confirms or conforms with preexisting beliefs and opinions while avoiding or forgetting information that challenges them. It also tends to cause us to interpret new information as confirmation that our existing beliefs and/or opinions are correct.
In marketing, this can skew your ideas and analyses. If you believe certain things about your audience or campaigns, you may end up ignoring important information that would challenge whatever you may be convinced is right. If you’re convinced certain messaging will resonate with your audience and it doesn’t, it may cause you to attribute the poor performance to something else. You should be running tests to see what is the most effective, but you could also waste a lot of time and money testing the wrong things if confirmation bias gets in the way.
In your marketing efforts, you can use the principles of confirmation bias to create content that resonates with your target audience and encourages them to interact with your brand. For customers who have already had a positive experience with your brand, customer retention strategies that resonate with them can help layer on that positivity and nudge them into loyal customers or brand ambassadors.
2. Hindsight Bias
As the cliche goes, “hindsight is 20/20.” We have the cliche because of hindsight bias, which is the tendency to remember or think about past events as more predictable than they actually were at the time. “I knew that would happen” is easy to say after it happened and you can connect past events with the context and knowledge you have now that you didn’t have in the past.
It’s important to remind yourself of this during strategy and brainstorming sessions. If you become overly confident about how well you are able to predict outcomes, you could end up making some major marketing mistakes. Depending on how big the mistake is, you could even end up with an online reputation management problem.
3. Anchoring Bias
The anchoring bias, or anchoring effect, is where the first information we encounter is often more salient and holds a greater influence over our choices than information we encounter or learn later.
In marketing, web design and print design, social media, and more, we see this in making sure things are “above the fold” or important information is presented early, simply, and clearly. The sooner you can get the important stuff across as a marketer, designer, etc. the better chance you have at engaging further with your target audience.
Depending on the medium and the context, further engagement could be something as simple as reading the rest of a blog post or maybe even sharing it on social media or it could be a transaction or another step towards becoming a customer.
4. Recency Bias
Recency bias refers to the human brain’s tendency to place more value and emphasis on recent experiences, information, etc. than historic ones, even if what is most recent is not the most relevant. This bias is considered a memory bias where we tend to “forget” the bigger picture and longer history of experiences in favor of what has happened most recently.
This also leads us to take in recent events and weigh them more heavily and take them more seriously as a prediction of what could happen in the future. Essentially, without thinking about it, we tend to evaluate recent events as having a higher probability of happening again soon even if that probability is not realistic.
Because recency bias unrealistically values the most recent experiences, it does limit the window of information and context that is being considered, which can result in poor decision-making.
Combat Recency Bias by Considering the Bigger Picture
As a marketer, an example of recency bias would be seeing a drop in website traffic in the short term, assuming it will continue, and making strategic decisions based on that alone without looking at historical data and the bigger picture. Business owners can fall into this trap as well.
For example, seasonal businesses see short-term drops in traffic from search engines when search interest in their products/services decrease. Ignoring historical data and that overall context in favor of assuming the recent drop is caused by something else and will continue could lead to making decisions about business, marketing, and strategy that aren’t right for what is actually going on and could hurt growth in the long run.
5. Availability Heuristic
The availability heuristic is closely related to recency bias. Recency bias is even sometimes called availability bias because they interact so often and usually happen together. The availability heuristic is a mental shortcut where people base judgments about the probability of something happening or being true based on the information that comes to mind first, quickly, and easily.
Since recency bias is all about putting more value on recent events, they can often come to mind first and this is how recency bias often connects with the availability heuristic. But, the availability heuristic is not limited to just recent events.
If other information, facts, events, etc. come to mind first, they may have more effect on the judgments made than recent events that did not come to mind as quickly. Using the availability heuristic, we make decisions and judgments and process reality with the information most readily available to us.
The Availability Heuristic in Marketing
This is one of the reasons why brand matters to your business and why brand awareness and good user experience are so important. There are other things at play with brand awareness and customer loyalty, but the availability heuristic can come into play when it comes to purchasing decisions.
This is why so many brands try to stay “top-of-mind” and to do so in a way that builds them a positive reputation as a trusted authority and business. This is also one of the reasons why retargeting can work well and why providing a good experience at every stage of the buyer’s journey is important.
When someone thinks of your brand or hears about it, what information easily and quickly comes to mind? Does that information reflect well on your brand and encourage a contact or purchase or does it reflect poorly and drive customers away? These are some things to consider when it comes to your marketing, your business, and how you interact with customers.
6. Self-Serving Bias
The self-serving bias is all about maintaining our self-esteem, enhancing it, and advancing our self-interest. This bias refers to the habit of attributing positive outcomes to internal efforts and negative outcomes to external events or forces. In order to protect ourselves and our peace, our brains tend to attribute positive things that happen to our own efforts and negative things that happen to things outside of our control. It’s often a defense mechanism.
To be fair, things happen that are out of our control and life is not fair. Self-serving bias is when this internal vs external responsibility attribution error happens with situations that are within our control. In a school situation, if you don’t pay attention in class, learn the material, or study, and then fail an exam, the self-serving bias would be to blame the teacher, the school, etc. without acknowledging your own role in that negative outcome.
Self-serving bias can cause distortions in processing information, situations, etc. where we misjudge what is going on to preserve a positive view/feeling about ourselves while avoiding accountability or responsibility for our own actions in a situation. Self-serving bias can also show up as an overly favorable perception of oneself and in unethical or undesirable actions that only serve someone’s own interests.
Self-Serving Bias in Marketing to Customers
Self-serving bias can show up in marketing. It’s one of the factors at play when it comes to creating content that stands out, products that resonate, and building brands people want to be involved with. From a business perspective, aligning with your potential customer’s self-serving bias, at least in the sense of helping them maintain a good view of themselves, can increase the likelihood of them becoming your customer.
People want to feel good about themselves and if your product, service, content, etc. can help them accomplish something they want or help them feel smart, capable, funny, etc., they’re more likely to share it with others if it reflects well on them and to want to continue to interact with your business. This is something to consider in your marketing efforts, what you create for your business, and how you present it.
Self-Serving Bias as a Marketer
From a marketer’s perspective, the self-serving bias could come into play when evaluating data or tactics. You don’t want to suggest something for a business because it’s an idea you like that makes you look good if it doesn’t make sense for them or their target audience. At the same time, if a tactic isn’t working or a campaign underperforms expectedly, it’s important to make sure you’re not shrugging it off as things outside of your control without critically evaluating the internal stuff.
Was the messaging wrong? Was it the wrong strategy? Was it implemented correctly? Were the channels the right ones? There are tons of details that go into everything marketers do and create for businesses. Available data can’t always give you an exact and defined answer about what went wrong. To get the best idea of what to keep doing, stop doing, change, or test again, it’s important to keep it all in perspective and evaluate the pieces, sources, results, etc. fairly.
7. Framing Effect
The framing effect refers to how someone’s choice among a set of options is influenced more by how the options are presented than the information itself at times; essentially, how the options are framed. More specifically, the framing effect occurs when people tend to make choices that avoid risk when information is framed positively and tend to favor risk when information is framed negatively.
The Framing Effect in Everyday Life
One of the most common examples of the framing effect in action in everyday life is with purchasing decisions where the “risk” could be considered as taking a chance on a product by purchasing it. Think about the messaging for disinfectants; there’s a reason why all the messaging centers around how many germs they kill.
When presented with disinfectants that “kill 99% of germs” versus disinfectants where “only 1% of germs survive”, people are more likely to respond to the messaging with negative framing that describes how many germs die instead of the positive framing that describes how many live. This also aligns with the classic 1981 Tversky & Kahneman experiment considered the origin of the framing effect.
The Framing Effect in Marketing
When it comes to marketing, the framing effect has a big effect on how to approach your messaging, especially when it comes to your calls to action. If your messaging is meant to get someone to do something (i.e.: take a risk), then it makes sense for promotional copy or calls to action to present options with negative framing over positive.
It’s not a hard-and-fast rule that applies to all messaging in all circumstances all the time, but it is something to keep in mind as you’re writing and evaluating your brand messaging and marketing copy across channels, campaigns, and materials. Not only can this help you improve the effectiveness of your messaging overall, but it can also help you write successful calls to action for your business marketing campaigns.
8. False Consensus Effect
The false consensus effect, or consensus bias, refers to our tendency to view our own experiences, behaviors, opinions, beliefs, attributes, etc. as more common and appropriate than they are. We tend to view the world through our eyes and consider our experience “the norm” or what is typical of everyone.
It’s human nature to want to view our thoughts and actions as correct, normal, and appropriate; the false consensus effect comes into play when we extend that to others and overestimate how many people or how much people agree with our beliefs, behaviors, and attitudes.
The False Consensus Effect in Marketing
In marketing, the false consensus effect can seriously hinder how well you can define your target audience and understand your potential customer. If you don’t combat the false consensus effect, you may build a target audience based on your own thoughts and beliefs instead of those of potential customers.
Sometimes marketers are potential customers too, but for the most part, the person or team defining the target audience and marketing to them is not a member of that target audience. It’s important to understand your potential customer, their goals, their pain points, etc. to be able to position your brand effectively as a resource for them. If your understanding of your audience is wrong, your marketing efforts are not going to resonate with people who could actually become your customers.
9. Noble Edge Effect
The noble edge effect in the context of cognitive biases that can affect your marketing is all about corporate social responsibility and why it works when it is meaningful and authentic. With the noble edge effect, brands that meaningfully and authentically display social responsibility tend to be received positively by customers and potential customers and tend to be rewarded with growth because of it. The combination of CSR (corporate social responsibility) and the noble edge effect within the context of marketing boils down to how doing something good can also be good for business.
The Noble Edge Effect Can Improve Brand Perception
Not only does this positively affect overall brand perception, but it can also extend to referral programs offered by that brand and how the program is structured. In this way, provided your efforts are authentic, the noble edge effect can help potential customers develop a more positive view of your brand and help increase customer loyalty for existing customers.
The caveat here is that it has to be perceived as genuine, authentic, and not purely self-serving. It can’t be all about you or be insincere. If it is, or even comes across that way, you could end up with a negative brand perception instead.
It Can Also Cause Marketers to Overestimate or Miss Details
As a marketer, just be aware of this effect on yourself as you evaluate overall branding, brand messaging, brand awareness, brand perception, etc. If you go too far into the noble edge effect, you could find yourself overestimating impacts or viewing a brand with rose-colored glasses and missing important details, especially if self-serving bias also comes into play because the related causes are important to you or part of your identity.
10. Halo Effect
Part of the reason the noble edge effect works, when done right, is due to the halo effect. The halo effect is when one trait of something or someone is used to make an overall judgment about it or them. It also extends to how the overall impression of a person, business, thing, etc. affects judgments about their character, reputation, quality, etc.
Although it is mostly perceived in the context of a positive trait leading to overall positive judgments, the caveat of the halo effect is that it can go either way. One negative trait or experience can also lead to an overall negative judgment about a brand or a person.
This, along with negativity bias and some other mental shortcuts, contributes to why it can take up to 12 positive experiences to make up for one unresolved negative experience with a brand. And, contributes to why things like public relations, brand awareness, social listening, online reputation management, and more are so important for building, monitoring, and maintaining your brand online.
11. Pricing Placebo Effect
The marketing placebo effect, more specifically the pricing placebo effect, refers to how, as consumers, we often associate higher prices with higher quality. In the past, this was thought to also influence how we perceived our experience with the product as well.
In certain situations, there may be some influence. However, the overall effect on experience when it comes to price does not seem to be as strong as the effect on the perception of what the experience will be.
Essentially, although higher prices do affect expectations and can influence expectations of the product, it does not tend to apply to actual experience with the product. Higher-priced products, services, etc. do increase expectations for them, but do not extend to how we perceive our experience with them once we actually try or use them.
From a marketing perspective, higher prices could give you an edge, but only if your product actually lives up to the hype. If it doesn’t, you could receive a bigger negative reaction because the initial expectations and costs involved for the consumer were higher. There may be some insulation if the sunk costs fallacy comes into play, but you definitely should not rely on that to make up for mismanaging customer expectations or straight-up misleading them.
12. Sunk Cost Fallacy
The sunk cost fallacy, or sunk cost effect, occurs when someone chooses to do something or chooses to continue to do something based on the amount of time or money invested in it, even when stopping would be beneficial. The sunk cost fallacy is more than just pushing through and not quitting to achieve something; it’s continuing to pour money, time, and effort into something that isn’t working just because so much has already been invested.
In some cases, this has led to breakthroughs. In most cases, it has led to a lot of wasted time and money. Sometimes, it’s something we see clearly in hindsight while other times, we missed or ignored the cues to stop because we convinced ourselves to keep going to try and make our investments worthwhile.
In marketing, this can mean a lot of wasted dollars, missed opportunities, etc. This is not to say that you should drop a campaign just because you’re not getting the results you expected immediately. Some things do take time and are a longer-term investment.
Good marketing is often a series of iterations and experiments and, depending on what you’re doing, you may need to give something time to work and try a few things before evaluating whether it makes sense to keep going or do something different. Giving your campaigns a fair chance and evaluating them fairly while also avoiding the sunk cost effect is the goal.
13. The Ostrich Effect
The Ostrich Effect refers to how people will go out of their way to avoid or “miss” negative information, particularly information that they feel will trigger anxiety or stress. In a way, they are “sticking their heads in the sand” to avoid the discomfort of dealing with the negative information they are avoiding.
In marketing, this can cause you to ignore important information or avoid looking deeper into potential issues. Not only can this cause larger issues down the road or lead you to make the wrong decisions regarding your marketing efforts, but it can also help create and reinforce the sunk cost fallacy.
14. Social Proof
While the false consensus effect prioritizes and generalizes personal experiences when determining what is typical, social proof prioritizes the experiences of others. It comes into play particularly in situations where people are unsure.
Social proof is a way to outsource decisions and copy others in situations where people are unsure how to act or what to do. Social proof can also come into play when it comes to purchasing decisions, especially when trying a new service or thinking about trying a new product.
It’s one of the reasons why authentic reviews can make a big difference in purchasing decisions. Authentic customer reviews, testimonials, case studies, and more are all ways to use social proof on your website to help build trust with customers and encourage purchases of your products or services.
15. Twyman’s Law
Named after Tony Twyman, a media and market researcher, Twyman’s Law is considered one of the most important laws of data analysis. Twyman’s Law is less of a cognitive bias and more of a validation check for analyzing data and results. Twyman’s Law states, “Any figure that looks interesting or different is usually wrong. The more unusual or interesting the data, the more likely they are to have been the result of an error of one kind or another.”
In the context of analytics, website metrics, and data analysis, this concept applies to outstanding and notable results. As marketers, it’s easy to get swept up in the excitement of exciting results, but it’s important to check ourselves and validate the data and results before getting too far into things and especially before making any decisions based on those results.
If there has been an abnormally huge spike in website visits and/or conversions, it’s important to check into what may have caused the spike and weed out errors. Is the spike authentic users, is it related to referral spam or bot traffic? Does Google Trends show increased search interest for the topics of the pages seeing increased visits or could something else be going on? Helping to diagnose traffic drops or getting a fuller picture of increases or decreases are some helpful ways to use Google Trends.
16. Clustering Illusion
We are built to recognize patterns. Our brains are hardwired to do so. In addition to leading to recognizing or seeing faces in objects where there aren’t, this can also lead to the clustering illusion where we cluster things together and convince ourselves of patterns in random events that do not exist.
Our brains cluster or recognize patterns in this way because the brain takes a small sample of data, assumes it is representative of the whole, and then generalizes it and applies the clustering cognitive shortcut to “identify” a pattern. Although this can be useful for making decisions, it can also be a fallacy that leads to errors.
In marketing, this is especially true when analyzing data, drawing conclusions, and then making strategy decisions based on those conclusions. If you’re making decisions based on patterns that do not actually exist the way you have perceived them, you may be targeting the wrong things or focusing on the wrong things.
17. Salience Bias
Salience bias refers to how people tend to pay attention to what is most visible. Essentially, we pay attention to elements that are the most visible and the most prominent. This can also include elements that stand out because they are contrasting or unexpected.
Since what we pay attention to affects our decision-making, salience bias plays a role in both our marketing efforts targeted to others as well as how we process and analyze things as marketers. As marketers, it’s important to recognize when salience bias is in effect and to make the effort to pay attention to other elements to make sure we’re getting the full picture and all of the necessary context and nuance.
18. Outcome Bias
Outcome bias refers to the phenomenon where people judge a decision based on the outcome. Although it may seem similar to Hindsight bias, Outcome bias is different. The basis of Hindsight bias is that we think things are more predictable than they are. Hindsight may play a role in Outcome bias, but it is about the tendency to judge decisions based on the outcome only.
Whether a decision has an outcome you perceive as positive or negative doesn’t necessarily mean the decision itself was good or bad based solely on the outcome. It is entirely possible a decision was “good” and the negative outcome was unrelated or caused by unforeseen circumstances.
For example, buying a new car because you need a new car wasn’t a bad decision just because someone stole it. The decision itself was a good one; the fact that something negative happened later doesn’t change that. Conversely, buying something you don’t need wasn’t necessarily a good decision just because you decided to play the lottery later and won. The decision itself may not have been a “good” one at the time; the fact that something positive happened later doesn’t change that or mean making a habit of unnecessary purchases is a good thing.
Correlation does not imply causation. Outcome bias makes us prone to believe that it does and if we’re not aware of it, we may allow positive or negative outcomes to color our perception and we may incorrectly evaluate a decision as good or bad, which can have negative effects on future decision making. When it comes to planning and evaluating marketing efforts, it’s important to make sure outcome bias isn’t affecting your perception of the results.
These are just a few of the common cognitive biases that can affect your marketing. Whether you are planning new campaigns or strategies or evaluating your efforts, being aware of them can help you avoid potential missteps with your own thought processes and also make your marketing efforts more effective.
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