Bikeshedding
Why people obsess over trivial details instead of complex decisions and how to use bikeshedding in your marketing strategy.
In this issue
Hey 👋 The Crew here.
Ah, the good ol’ first week of September.
It’s the time when half of our inbox screams “Back to school!” and the other half screams “Pumpkin spice!”
Meanwhile, you’re just trying to remember what day it is…
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If your team meeting ever turned into a battle over a button color while nobody touched the pricing model—congrats! You’re in the club. You and a majority of every company’s employees.
People naturally focus on trivial issues more because they are easier to understand and debate about.
It’s known as Bikeshedding. Or Parkinson’s Law of Triviality.
Why the name? Well, we have C. Northcote Parkinson to thank. Yep, the guy who said having more time to complete a task makes us less productive—sixty years ago.
In that same piece of work Parkinson noted that committees approve multi-million dollar projects quickly but debate cheap bike sheds for ages.
Sounds about right. Everyone feels qualified to have an opinion on the small, simple stuff.
This feels productive, but it’s often a way to avoid complex problems that require real mental effort.
And guess what? Your customers are the same.
Three ways to leverage Bikeshedding
Make your Call-To-Action the bike shed
A busy landing page is full of hidden bike shed moments.
Users get lost in details and start looking at footer links, images, or boxes of text instead of… well, doing what you want them to do.
How to prevent this? Make your CTA the most obvious and simple thing to focus on.
Use high-contrast colors and simple language like Wrike, for example. Their site illustrates the service quite well, but the bright green button is what provides a simple, clear focus point:
It’s the bike shed they want you to focus on.
Introduce deliberate imperfection in your campaigns
It’s a cheat code: By giving people a “bike shed” to discuss, you control where the nitpicking goes.
Instead of losing them in distracting details, you steer the conversation toward the hook you’ve set up. Genius, right?
What you can do: Include a deliberate imperfection that works like a bike shed. It can be small, or you can frame an entire campaign, or product around it.
Either way it gives your audience something easy to latch onto, discuss, and engage with.
KFC leaned into this when they ran their famous “FCK” bucket ad after running out of chicken in the UK.
Or take Crocs. Their “ugly-but-comfy” positioning flips a design imperfection into a talking point. People can debate whether they’re hideous or brilliant, but either way, they’re talking about Crocs.
Us? Well… we love Crocs, of course.
Frame complex data with a simple story
People latch onto what they can easily grasp. So do our brains.
Any complex data requires you to put your cognitive abilities to a test, but it can also be an open invitation to bikeshed over insignificant details.
This can leave your audience nitpicking over trivialities, which you don’t want.
What to do instead: Whether you distribute blogs, videos, or run ads, frame data within using singular, compelling takeaways.
One great example is the Spotify Wrapped campaign. It distills a year of complex listening data into simple, shareable insights like, “You were in the top 1% of listeners.”
Users focus on that emotional story, not the raw data behind it.
That’s also something we try to do with our Data Stories. Check them out and you’ll see what we mean.
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AI SEARCH:Different strokes for different AI folks. New analysis found that Google’s AI and ChatGPT disagree on brand recommendations nearly two-thirds of the time. In fact, only 17% of queries produced the same brand suggestions across all platforms studied. Good to know.
INSTAGRAM: Your Reels might get a longer shelf life on screen, soon. Instagram is now testing a picture-in-picture feature that lets users watch your videos outside the app. This could significantly boost your retention and watch time stats as viewers multitask. Let’s hope it sticks.
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ICYMI, last time we looked at Survivorship Bias.
The “Painting the shed” Crew
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