Warm Glow Effect
Why doing good makes people feel good, and how to use the warm glow effect to boost purchases and brand loyalty in your marketing strategy.
In this issue
Hey 👋 The Crew here.
The break is over and we’re back in business.
Our first realization? We’re already two weeks deep into the year. This is usually the period where we realize that our New Year’s resolutions aren’t as sturdy as we thought they are.
Reading time: 4 minutes, 52 seconds
Ever had to fill out a gnarly security questionnaire inside a vendor’s portal and hated your life?
Delve just launched an AI browser agent that does it for you.
It finds answers from your policies, past questionnaires, and docs, then fills everything in while you click next. Hours → minutes. Switch to Delve for compliance and use this – and every other game-changing AI feature at one simple cost.
If you’re using another platform for compliance, Delve will migrate you over *or free.*
- Stacked Marketer readers get $1,000 off compliance using the link below.
Set it and forget it >>> sweating questionnaires.
You’re standing at a coffee counter, waiting to pay.
The barista spins the iPad screen around to face you. It asks for a tip.
You press the button for 20% and you walk away feeling generous. You tell yourself you did it to support the worker. And you did, partly.
But really? You also did it for the rush. And that’s nothing bad or unordinary.
That feeling is the Warm Glow Effect. Economist James Andreoni coined it in 1990. He argued against “pure altruism” and claimed we are actually “impure altruists.”
In other words, we don’t do good deeds only to give help. The act also triggers pleasure centers in the brain. Paradoxically, it satisfies a selfish need to feel moral.
What does this mean for marketing: Your customers want to feel like heroes. They crave the dopamine of “doing good.” But they are also busy… and kind of lazy.
If you can give them that “hero feeling” without the hard work, you win. Let’s see how.
Three ways to leverage Warm Glow Effect
Make the goodness visible
Good deeds feel better when they leave a trace.
Even more than just doing good, customers want confirmation that they’ve done good. So when you make this impact visible you lock in the warm glow.
A simple example: checkout messages that say “You just helped plant 3 trees” on a receipt, confirmation screen, or even better—a follow up e-mail, is enough to lock in the warm glow.
It’s like a closure for your mind.
Brands like Ecosia do this well. Every search updates a visible tree counter.
You’re not just searching the web. You’re watching yourself do something good in real time.
Pretty good way to retain customers in a very competitive niche. Especially the one that’s often tied to the opposite deeds.
Delegate the good deed
Remember when we said customers are lazy?
They want the moral reward, but not the cognitive or physical load of acting morally.
When the brand takes responsibility for the good deed, customers still get the warm glow. But there’s no effort, calculation, or guilt. It just feels efficient.
Patagonia’s “1% for the planet” does this well. They don’t ask for a donation, they just tell their customers that the donation already happened.
So when someone buys a $90 fleece, it’s two things—buying warmth and endorsing a value system. The customer walks away knowing that they’ve chosen the ethical option.
The Buy-One-Give-One Model
This is the ultimate shortcut.
You bake the charity into the purchase so your customer isn’t “spending” money. Your customer is solving a crisis by shopping.
Bombas, for instance, built an entire sock empire on this principle: you buy one pair of socks, they donate one.
They’ve realized that people will pay a premium for socks that come with deeper purpose. It sounds funny, but that’s true. With this, the transaction becomes a moral act as well.
And the glow is instant.
AI EDUCATION: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Midjourney… So many names, but what’s actually useful for you in your work? There’s a newsletter called The Deep View that exists to sift through all the noise and get you up to speed on what’s actionable with AI products, and it’s free. Join 512,000+ subscribers with one click and let AI empower you.*
AI TACTICS: Struggling to find a practical use for AI in your marketing work? No worries. Every Saturday, we will send you a free newsletter to sharpen your marketing skills and get more wins for yourself and your clients, including the latest AI use cases with actual examples and prompts you can just swipe. Subscribe for free.*
AI MARKETING:No more uncanny valley. Instagram chief Adam Mosseri just admitted that AI content will soon be indistinguishable from human-created work, all while Meta’s AI tools are flooding the platform with that exact slop.Human content might become your big advantage.
YOUTUBE:On that same note, a new study found that over 20% of videos suggested to new users are low-quality AI slop, generating billions of views and serious ad revenue. Expect that volume of synthetic content to skyrocket this year. Sigh…
PODCASTS:New research shows that audio podcast ads outperform YouTube podcast video ads by 18% to 25% in driving actual purchases. Apparently, intentional listening and stronger host trust give audio the edge over video’s more passive environment. Interesting.
REDDIT: Now that’s a spike. Reddit is seeing the fastest advertising revenue growth among major social platforms, hitting 93% year-over-year. The platform’s real conversations are beating AI-generated content in rankings, which means your ads reach audiences with clear intent.
ICYMI, last time we looked at the Processing Fluency.
The “Warm and fuzzy” Crew
*This is a sponsored post.
Get the next psychology effect in your inbox.
Receive cutting-edge, science-driven marketing insights and tips every Thursday, for free.
