Make your customer confident each step of the way

People tend to trust their own judgement. Even if it’s a bit shaky.

Instead of suggesting or encouraging any doubt, create quizzes, calculators, or guides that affirm their instincts.

Guess who’s the master of this? Yep, Duolingo.

One feature from Duolingo’s early days “tested you” to assess your language and maybe skip a few levels.

The truth: Duolingo’s test doesn’t challenge you.

It simply affirms your skills while nudging you to start learning. It makes you think you already know enough, sending you off on a confidence-boosting journey.

How you can leverage this: Guide your customers through quick, non-intimidating assessments, whether it’s a product quiz, a “find your perfect fit” tool, or an interactive guide.

If you frame it as something they already know or feel like they are close to a solution, you’ll make customers feel confident about moving forward and more likely to trust you.

Wrap confidence in positive affirmations

To tell you a secret: Super confident people are often trigger-friendly.

In other words, if you make them really confident, you’ll ease their purchase decisions.

Brands understand this, so they hype up their audiences’ boldness, self-belief, and action without overthinking. All traits that can look like, or encourage overconfidence.

And who does it better than Nike?

This entire message encourages you to act confidently and decisively, even if doubt or fear might hold you back. It also frames impulsive confidence as a virtue.

Key point: While we often associate overconfidence with misjudgment of true ability, Nike celebrates the positive emotional side of this. The feeling you can take on anything.

… Even if, realistically, you might fail sometimes.

Sometimes, an overly confident message can backfire

Psychologists Fischoff and Lichtenstein found that when people are about 50% accurate in their guesses, they feel way more confident than they should.

Take flipping a coin, for instance.

But as people get better at something and as their confidence and skills start matching up, this overconfidence diminishes.

Once they get really good—over 80% accurate—they even start doubting themselves a little.

So if people think they know something well when in fact they don’t, they might be overconfident.

You can leverage this by targeting beginner users with very broad, confident messaging, like Canva does:

The message, the choices… everything makes new users feel capable of diving in.

But as users become more experienced, Canva introduces advanced tutorials, professional templates, and expert-level tips with a tone catered to a more skilled crowd.

Smart, huh?