Construal Level Theory
How psychological distance changes whether people judge ideas by desirability or feasibility, and how to apply construal level theory in marketing.
In this issue
Happy Thursday.
We don’t do this often but…It’s International Left Handers Day. Yep, we’ll take time to honor the 10% of you who’ve spent a lifetime smudging every sentence you write.
Also: scissors. Notebooks. Can openers. That little ridge on the mouse. Ah man. If you’re a righty, take a moment to appreciate a world built entirely around you.
Let’s move on to marketing.
What if doing nothing beat 90% of professional fund managers?
The investment industry sells complexity. Research. Timing. Alpha.
The data tells a different story. Over any 20-year period, a simple world index fund has outperformed more than 90% of professionals. Most investors who try to beat the market end up paying more in fees to underperform it.
The edge isn’t intelligence. It’s patience.
But patience is hard when your portfolio feels abstract. A passive fund is just a ticker on a screen. The thousands of companies inside it, the businesses you actually co-own, stay invisible.
90 Percent fixes that. Every week, it pulls one company at random from the world equity index and tells you what it actually does.
- The Brazilian company that makes the electric motors inside almost everything that spins.
- The Florida company that sells your airline its spare parts at half the price.
- The Japanese hardware company hiding inside every factory.
One company. Every week. Yours to discover.
Next July’s marathon? Sounds noble.
But tomorrow’s 6 AM run on a rainy day? That sounds like a personal attack.
The only difference is the psychological distance. And researchers call this Construal Level Theory.
Its gist: the further away something feels, the more abstractly our brains render it.
Trope and Liberman mapped four distances: time, space, social, and hypothetical. Push any of them out and thinking jumps from gritty details to big-picture why.
- Close things get judged on feasibility: the how, the effort, the 6 AM alarm.
- Distant things get judged on desirability: the medal, the identity, the version of us that runs.
Which explains why gym memberships feel brilliant in December and unbearable by January 3rd.
Prospects do this too. Cold audiences shop for meaning. Warm ones shop for logistics.
Mismatch those and conversions die quietly, with nobody filing a bug report.
Three ways to leverage Construal Level Theory
Drag the payoff into today
Before the infamous “FaceApp” that had millions generate their old selves in 2019 , Merrill Edge’s Retirement app did something similar.
It aged their users through a webcam photo to show them their retirement-age face and they were prompted to share on Facebook at the time.
Just like that, retirement stopped being a rumour.
It was built on Hershfield’s research: people shown images of their future selves allocated about twice as much money to savings.
For any product with a delayed payoff, render the future in high resolution. Show the person, not the principle.
Delete the hypothetical
Paint brand Lick doesn’t sell tester pots. It sells peel-and-stick patches of real paint that move around your walls.
Samples run about $2 with free delivery, and a calculator tells you exactly how many tins your room needs.
“Would this colour work?” becomes a patch above the sofa at 6 PM. Hypothetical resolved.
Sizing quizzes, sample kits and sandbox demos all use this same principle.
Every unanswered “what if” is distance doing damage.
Match construal to funnel stage
Much Better Adventures sells the abstract upfront: escape, challenge, the version of you that climbs things.
Then the trip pages turn brutally concrete. Seven difficulty levels, daily activity hours, altitude, terrain, plus kit lists and verified reviews.
Tourism research backs the split. Distant-future or far-destination travellers prefer abstract messages; near ones prefer concrete.
Ads sell the why. Product pages answer the how. Swapping those is how good offers can die.
Can AI manage social media better than a human? Planable put it to the test
They tracked 7 Instagram accounts running the same fictional chocolate brand, measuring everything from posting consistency to performance.
Humans out-engaged AI 2.45x on engagement rate. Every human account beat every AI account on likes and follower growth.
This experiment offers one of the clearest, numbers-backed answers yet.
CLAUDE: Your ghostwriter now signs its work. Claude’s text carries an invisible watermark, generated files get C2PA metadata, and it’s live worldwide for models launched from August 2. Only what Claude writes gets marked, so docs you hand over for review stay clean.
GOOGLE: Gemini just crossed a billion monthly users, the fastest climb of any product in the company’s history. Worth noting: that count is app-only, not the AI baked into Search or Gmail. Voice now drives 63% of use, and 150 million images ship daily.
AI MARKETING: New YouGov data has ChatGPT preferred by 33.7% of US adults who used generative AI last month, with Gemini second at 18.2%. But watch the trend: Gemini climbed 6.8 points since February while ChatGPT slipped 5.9. Momentum may eventually beat a lead.
YOUTUBE: First major Partner Program overhaul since 2018 lands February 1, 2027. Shorts ad revenue sharing now demands 10 million qualified views per 90 days. Creators below will chase brand deals and Shopping bonuses instead. It’s getting harder to monetize if you’re smaller…
ICYMI, last time we looked at the Attribute Substitution.
The “Close enough” Crew.
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