Hey 👋 The Crew here.
Ever wished you had the marketing equivalent of Jedi mind tricks? We guess you do—you’re reading this newsletter after all. Well, we can help you take a step in that direction. For free.
You can get our guide on How To Change People’s Minds and Behavior which delves into the psychology of behavior, motivation, and action.
Understanding this will help you create better ads and get more sales.
All you have to do to get this guide for free is to contribute to our State of Marketing 2025 survey and reply with a screenshot of the completion as proof. Takes two minutes.
Complete the survey and get the guide here.
Reading time: 4 minutes, 25 seconds
New to Psychology of Marketing? Join us for free 🤝
Starting to see diminishing returns on search and social?
If you’ve been relying on search and social ads to grow your brand, you’ve probably noticed those channels aren’t bringing in customers like they used to, thanks to rising costs and tougher competition.
Now is a good time to diversify your media mix—and Incremental Media has been guiding brands through the process for 19 years.
With their help, you can pick the right channels for your audience and customer acquisition goals, from podcasts and email newsletters to package inserts and shared mail.
Working with Incremental Media gives you:
- Access to a database of over 2,000 media suppliers so you find the best fit for your brand.
- Detailed reporting that tracks how new channels are driving incremental conversions.
- Experts with over 10 years of experience guiding your media strategy.
Curious to see how your competitors are moving beyond search and social?
Connect with Incremental Media and they can provide a free competitive analysis.
Pro Innovation Bias
If you’ve come across any new interesting SaaS products recently, you’ve probably seen these words next to it:
“AI-powered.” “AI-fueled.” AI-driven.”
AI companies race to the top, investors pour money into AI projects, and users look for the next best AI-powered tools.
The tech is new, powerful, and it’s printing money. For now.
But what nobody talks about is that 80% of all AI projects fail.
Yet, despite the low success rate, these projects keep getting and wasting billions of dollars.
Why? It’s all thanks to psychology—or our pro-innovation bias, in this case.
Pro-innovation bias is the tendency to overvalue the benefits of innovation while underestimating its limitations or potential downsides.
Remember how web 3.0 was all the rage a few years ago? Remember NFTs?
You can go back further, too. Remember a few decades before, when every online company went overvalued during the “Dot-com bubble”?
In the end, society embraced some of this tech—but the majority of these projects failed, money was lost, and new problems surfaced.
But that’s just human nature.
The most important thing is that pro-innovation bias is a strong tendency, which is why companies use it when they want to sell their products.
Now let’s see how we can apply this bias…
Three ways you can leverage pro-innovation bias
1) Focus on innovation in your campaigns, even when it’s minimal
We love shiny new things—even if the glow wears off quickly.
Think about it. Apple delivers a new iPhone every year. But what tangible improvement would you actually feel if you switched from last year’s to this year’s phone?
Probably not much. Yet, Apple promotes every iPhone like it’s never-seen-before tech:
There’s a big lesson here for all of us marketers: Whenever you can, try to highlight at least something new into your brand—and then promote it.
Adding a new flavor to your collection of soft drinks? Brand it as “revolutionary new taste.”
Adding a chatbot to your SaaS landing page? Announce to your customers that they’ll have a new “AI-powered personal assistant.”
Sometimes, just a dash of “new and improved” can make the “same old” disappear.
2) Always highlight trendy features or tech within your products
When you should do this? Whenever you can.
A few years ago, one Reddit user noticed that brands were labeling their products “vegan,” even when it was obvious that the product is vegan. Like regular pasta, for example.
Why do this? Because there’s a chance you’ll sell more.
If there is an innovative tech or trend that you can incorporate into your copy or packaging, highlight it as the prime benefit or feature of your brand.
Here’s how a clothing brand emphasizes the latest tech in producing sustainable clothing on their website:
Be careful, though: Only use labels and claims you can really back up. Otherwise, it’s just false advertising.
You don’t want to be that brand.
3) Compare to competitors that use “outdated” tech
This is one of our favorite use-cases. Maybe yours, too.
Competitor comparisons are frequent in marketing—largely because they also have a little bit of pro-innovation bias sprinkled in. Like this one:
This Heights ad is only missing “eco-friendly packaging” for the buzzword trinity.
Here’s another one:
- Emphasis on innovative design? Check.
- Highlighting a trendy sustainable program? Check.
- Buzzwords such as “circular economy?” Check.
A really good ad.
EMAIL MARKETING: Learn to make $2,000 to $5,000 a month per client with The Email Freedom Formula by writing and managing emails for other businesses. Steal the method Francis teaches his community to land 4-figure email clients, for free. Get The Email Freedom Formula here.*
INFLUENCER MARKETING: Keep your Black Friday and Cyber Monday ads fresh with a steady supply of licensed UGC, while getting extra organic reach from micro-influencers whose followers vibe with your brand. It’s super easy, too, because minisocial does the matching. Start your first campaign here.*
B2B MARKETING: The first step towards B2B customer acquisition? Discovery, of course. But how do B2B buyers actually discover products? This article delves into data—check it out.
VIDEO MARKETING: There’s psychology behind body language. And who leverages better than YouTube creators? This article breaks down the top facial expressions used in YouTube thumbnails. Useful if you’re a creator, or promoting one.
AI MARKETING: ¡Hola, Rufus! Amazon’s chatbot has landed in Europe—and is now in beta for France, Germany, Italy, and Spain. The chatbot pulls from Amazon’s listings, so keeping your product pages full of useful information will help the right shoppers find you. You’re welcome.
*This is a sponsored post.
ICYMI, last time we looked at the Labor illusion.
The “trendy new” Crew
Interested in advertising in one of our newsletters?
Connect with over 100,000 of the world’s best marketers who read a newsletter by Stacked Marketer.
