Confirmation Bias
Why people seek information that confirms their existing beliefs and how to use confirmation bias in marketing.
In this issue
Happy Thursday.
Here’s another issue of Psychology of Marketing. The marketing newsletter you’ll gatekeep from your team to sound like a wizard in your next meeting.
Today’s issue? Confirmation bias.
Reading time: 4 minutes, 62 seconds
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We’ve all shipped an A/B test secretly rooting for the variant we built.
It wins, and we’re geniuses. It loses, and the sample was just too small.
That reflex has a name. Confirmation bias is the mind’s habit of seeking, reading, and remembering information that props up what it already believes.
Anything that contradicts the belief gets waved through to the trash.
Researchers have poked at this since the 1960s, when Peter Wason found people test a hunch by hunting for evidence that fits, never evidence that breaks it.
Decades on, science still ranks it among the most stubborn biases we own.
It runs the everyday stuff, too:
- Buy a new car, and suddenly every review reads like a love letter.
- Decide a colleague is difficult, and every blunt message becomes more proof you were right.
Shoppers do exactly the same. They land already half-convinced, quietly scanning for permission to act on the hunch they walked in with.
Good brands fight on this instinct. They reflect this belief back and confirm the suspicion by handing over the evidence. Here are three ways to do it.
Three ways to leverage Confirmation Bias
Mirror the belief they walked in with
Shoppers rarely arrive blank. They already “know” their hair is dry, damaged, or impossible, and confirmation bias means they want that hunch confirmed.
Prose’s haircare quiz runs thirty-plus questions on hair, scalp, lifestyle, and goals, then reveals a custom formula built around the exact concerns the shopper just named.
It reads less like a sales pitch than a diagnosis: finally, a brand that gets my hair.
That validation does the selling. The shopper’s belief is reflected straight back, so trust forms before they read a single ingredient.
Steal the move: build a quiz or onboarding flow that surfaces the customer’s stated problem, then names it back as the thing your product exists to fix.
Confirm the problem they already suspect
Most marketers walk around quietly convinced their site has SEO issues. They just lack the receipts.
Semrush’s free SEO Checker hands them over in seconds: an overall score plus a prioritized list of errors, warnings, and notices.
The hunch is now documented fact. The quiet relief of being right makes the recommended fix feel obvious rather than upsold.
That fix, naturally, is the paid Site Audit, parked right beside the free result with a nudge about the problems lurking where you can’t see them.
How to confirm their problems? Offer a free diagnostic that confirms the suspicion your buyer already carries, then make your paid product the logical next step from their own results.
Arm the choice they’re leaning toward
A prospect who suspects enterprise software is bloated and overpriced types “Pipedrive vs Salesforce” into Google. They are not shopping. They are seeking proof.
Pipedrive’s own comparison page delivers it: Salesforce cast as complex, hard to set up, built for giant budgets; Pipedrive cast as the simple, affordable win.
It even spotlights a customer who ran the two head-to-head and says Pipedrive won by a landslide.
Every line confirms the lean the visitor already had, so the decision feels like their own independent conclusion.
Steal the move: build comparison content for buyers already drifting your way. Frame the contrast around the belief they hold, and let them gather the evidence themselves.
The platform agencies use to manage content — now connected to AI
If you’re managing a content team, you already know the drill: AI in one tab, approvals in another, clients asking for changes over email.
Planable is where posts get created, reviewed, and approved before anything goes live. It connects to Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Canva, Slack, Zapier, and more.
One place. Full approval flow.
AI MARKETING: Pew asked 5,000+ Americans about AI and found that about half now use chatbots, up from 33% in 2024. OpenAI’s tool leads at 44%, beating Gemini, Copilot, Meta AI, Grok, and Claude. Most folks treat these bots as search engines so get your brand into AI answers.
YOUTUBE:New AI-powered comment tools in YouTube Studio let you search comments by meaning, not just keywords. Type a conversational query like “questions about my gear” or “people asking for a part 2 video,” and the AI groups them for you. Neaty.
TIKTOK:… discovered a plot twist. Growth Max for Mini Dramas lets brands publish episodic content and amplify it into on-platform revenue. TikTok claims these campaigns drive a 52% lift in incremental audience reach. Worth a look if storytelling fits your brand.
AI MARKETING: Google really wants you to become your own graphics designer and video editor thanks to Nano Banana 2 Lite and Gemini Omni Flash. Both models are better, faster, and more cost-efficient and already available. We know what we’re testing out today.
SOCIAL MEDIA: To teen or not to teen? That is the question countries are answering, with more and more rolling out restrictions or at least considering them for teens’ access to social media apps. The kicker? Data shows that even after a ban, many teens still have social media accounts. Shocker, we know.
ICYMI, last time we looked at the Anticipation Effect.
The “We knew it” Crew.
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