Hey 👋🏻 The Crew here.
While we were sitting here worrying about AI stealing our jobs, it started stealing our favorite commercials instead.
For example, Coca-Cola apparently paid homage to its iconic Christmas ad by—wait for it—recreating it with its generative AI software.
Sounds like something the Grinch would do to ruin the occassion…
Reading time: 4 minutes, 35 seconds
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Cognitive load
Imagine you’re driving in a big, unfamiliar city for the first time.
And a series of things are happening at once: You’re listening to your maps app giving directions, monitoring traffic, and having a hands-free call with a co-worker who’s trying to solve an urgent problem at work.
Your mental resources are stretched thin.
And the main task—driving safely—is getting harder and harder, increasing the risks that you miss a turn or commit a more serious error.
This mental weight is called Cognitive load. It’s based on a theory developed in the 1980s by John Sweller but has since become a central framework in educational research.
At its core, this theory is built on a few key principles:
- Our mind can only process two to four chunks of new information at the same time.
- Information retention is limited to 20 seconds.
- There are multiple types of cognitive load—from internal effort to learn, to how external information is structured or designed.
In marketing, the main task is getting your customer to buy.
If you’re putting them into a situation where they have to manage multiple tasks simultaneously, they’ll feel overwhelmed. And frustrated. And eventually, they’ll just abandon everything.
So what can you do? Manage their cognitive load for them.
Three ways to leverage Cognitive load
1) Simplify product information
If your customer’s mind can only process a small number of information sets at once, why would you burden it with more?
It will just create cognitive constraints, lead to mental fatigue, and take your customer away from checkout.
Instead, try to de-clutter your landing pages, ad copy, and emails.
You can do this by breaking down complex bits of info: The single most essential solution to their biggest pain, one core benefit, and a few logistical product details such as price or visual cues.
And you don’t have to be on Apple’s level of product minimalism.
Here’s a mindfulness accessories brand that simplifies information quite nicely:
See that? One image combined with three simple sentences that tell you everything you need to know.
Simple, effective, and unobtrusive.
2) Use visual aids strategically
Cognitive loads often happen when a page is stuffed with tons of details, which is why minimalist designs often work.
When you keep designs clean and uncluttered—with ample white space, for example—you let key elements breathe and stand out, reducing “visual overwhelm.”
Use quality imagery with minimal distractions. Break down complex information into digestible visual chunks. And guide customers naturally through the content.
Duolingo’s onboarding epitomizes this:
Every part of the progress is super simple to track, easy on the eye, and leads you through the process with minimal mental effort.
3) Leverage mental schemas
Ever heard of mental schemas?
When you think of a “tree,” your brain automatically conjures a trunk, branches, and leaves, even though you’ve seen thousands of different trees. Interesting, no?
These pre-existing frameworks in our brains that help us understand new information by relating it to familiar concepts. And—more importantly—it frees up our cognitive load.
So how can we do this in marketing? One way brands do it is with analogical comparisons, or “X for Y,” where X is a familiar brand.
For example, did you know that Airbnb was first marketed as “eBay for space?”
You can position your brand with a similar analogy. Uber for X? Tinder for X?
We searched for Tinder for dogs and guess what:
Look at that… it exists!
You can use mental schemas for UX design too—using familiar design patterns, checkout processes, and connecting new products to established categories.
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BUSINESS: Online business marketplace is tough. So when a buying or selling opportunity comes—how will you value it? You’ll refer to data. This article looks into popular business marketplace’s data to help you understand online business values. Worth a look.
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SEO: Google is putting its foot down, tightening its spam policy, and taking action against “parasite SEO” websites that publish content designed to exploit rankings. An example of such a site would be a news blog that hides coupon codes. Be careful that’s not you.
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ICYMI, last time we looked at the Nostalgia effect.
The “overloaded” Crew
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