Hey 👋 The Crew here.
Next time someone asks what’s the difference between a marketer and a salesperson, you say:
A marketer makes you want something you don’t need, while a salesperson makes you buy something you can’t afford.
We’ll get our coats…
Reading time: 4 minutes, 25 seconds
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How one brand 2x’d engagement and slashed social media creation time by 85%
Signify, a global leader in lighting solutions, faced a major challenge—creating social media content was taking wayyy too much time.
Their team was stretched so thin, they barely had room to focus on strategic initiatives.
Even after hiring a high-end social media agency, they still struggled to consistently engage and grow their channels.
That’s when they discovered Lately AI.
Lately’s AI-powered platform analyzed Signify’s existing content and turned it into months of social posts—all while maintaining their brand voice.
And if you’re thinking AI-generated content couldn’t possibly perform well, check out Signify’s results:
- Engagement grew by over 110% across platforms.
- Automated scheduling and posting increased reach by more than 150%.
- Social copy creation time dropped by 85%.
Want to see how you could ramp up social media engagement with far less effort?
Lately is offering Psychology of Marketing readers a 7-day free trial.
The labor illusion
“Make your customers wait less, and you will sell more.”
That’s the advice you’ll get from most marketers. And it makes sense at first…
But it also might be wrong.
In 2011, two Harvard professors conducted a set of experiments that simulated service experiences in online travel and online dating domains.
In one key experiment, 266 participants used simulated travel websites to book trips. The wait times varied between an instant booking and having to wait as long as 60 seconds.
Here’s the key detail: While they waited, some participants saw a list of flights being searched, while others only saw progress bars.
After booking, they were asked to rate the value of the service.
The findings? The scenario which showed changing flights—i.e., the effort exerted by the company—scored the highest across the board.
Yep, even more than instant results.
However, in the “blind” condition, where participants were shown a progress bar, the perceived value seemed to decrease drastically with time.
These studies confirmed that showing exerted effort can actually increase the perceived value of the service—even when the results are identical. Hence the “labor illusion.”
Long story short, we tend to equate effort with value, even when the end result is the same.
You can see companies using this a lot, both online and offline:
- The food delivery app that shows a live feed of the tasks involved in getting you your meal.
- Websites with loading animations, indicating there’s work being done in the backend.
- Handmade furniture manufacturers that showcase the creation process for their customers.
Let’s see how you can use this trick in your marketing strategy…
Three ways you can leverage the labor illusion
1) Add operational transparency elements to your page
As we established, a little wait can increase trust.
Your customers will associate that wait with more effort being put in—as long as you visibly depict that effort.
What does that mean in the context of online selling?
Well, try to set up a little bit of a delay on your page—even if it is artificial. But make sure that the progress in the backend is tangible and not “blind.”
Take this designer’s super smooth landing page, for example. It depicts the author sitting and working as it loads:
Great job, really.
2) Show the production process immediately
Sometimes, the final product comes with a veil of mystery.
How did it get made? Why is it special? If the price is premium… why? All these questions can create blocks in your customer’s decision-making.
And you can easily fix them: Just show them how it’s made.
Many brands do this on the landing page itself. For example, when you land on the Onyx Coffee page, you are transported to where it all begins—the coffee plantation they source it from:
The display of labor increases perceived value and quality.
3) Highlight the effort you put into development
A great product has depth.
In other words, your product should come with a narrative and a story that engages the audience.
You’ll notice plenty of brands emphasize the hard work and “rags to riches” stories in their “about us” pages.
This is also why brands love to share behind-the-scenes, casually revealing the “lows” as well as the highs, to show you that the process of bringing the product to life was far from smooth.
This all leverages the labor illusion: “Look how hard we’re working every day.”
Whitakker’s Chocolate has an entire “Beans-to-bar” page dedicated to showing how their chocolate arrives at your table. And it’s pretty awesome:
If you’re managing content for the brand, make sure you sprinkle in some behind-the-scenes content, development stories, low points, and hard work whenever you can.
Your audience will love it.
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REGULATIONS: Publishing fake reviews was never cool—but now it’s official. The FTC activated the ban on Monday, meaning penalties can be issued against violations. So no buying reviews, no AI-generated reviews, no intimidation tactics, and such. Nice.
GOOGLE: If you want to have accurate results from finance queries, don’t trust AI overviews. A study has found that Google’s AI chatbot fails at almost half (43%) of finance-related searches—especially with topics like taxes and investing.
ADVERTISING: Amazon’s ad spend continues to grow. Q3 saw almost double the dollars, from 8% to 15%. Meanwhile, everywhere else has seen a slowdown in digital advertising growth. Seems Amazon is the place to be for product pushing…
AI MARKETING: Oh wow. Runway has announced “Act-One,” a generative video tool that will allow you to use your facial expressions and voice as inputs to generate awesome live-action characters—both realistic and animated. You have to see it to believe it.
*This is a sponsored post.
ICYMI, last time we looked at the Reactance theory.
The “Work, work, work” Crew
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