The Secret To Marketing

How To Make Things New...Yet Familiar

[ THREAD ]

Let's go

Humans are a conflicted group.

On the one hand, we love novelty.

—People skydive
—People take drugs
—People explore foreign lands

But on the other hand...

We are deeply resistant to change. We love the familiar.

—We rewatch shows and movies
—We eat the same thing repeatedly
—We live in the same place for years

And this makes sense evolutionarily...

20,000 years ago, haphazardly chasing novelty was a good way to die.

—Stray too far from the tribe and you're dead
—Experiment with too many new fruits and you're dead
—Try to domesticate the wrong animal and you're dead

What does this mean for marketers?

It means that we must always balance competing forces: novelty and familiarity.

NO ONE is ready for something "entirely new." Truly new things are freakish and threatening.

The mind craves new things only when they connect to the familiar.

In fact, the best companies do this.

Let's take a look...

1: The Facebook

Before the internet, colleges issued actual facebooks to new students.

Facebook could have been called a digital social network. Except no one knew what a social network was in 2006.

By referencing the familiar, Facebook gained positioning in the mind.

2: Cars

The first cars weren't named cars.

They were marketed as "horseless carriages."

3: Apple's Skeumorphism

Skeuomorphism means design cues are taken from the physical world.

Steve Jobs realized that the iPhone was a groundbreaking innovation — almost too groundbreaking.

As a result, he pushed skeuomorphic design in the OS...

The leather seats in Jobs' Gulfstream jet inspired iCal's faux-leather.

—Notes looked like a notepad
—iBooks looked like a bookshelf
—Contacts looked like a leather journal

Many designers hated this.

But Jobs knew people accept the New only when it's linked to the Familiar.

4: Artists

Musicians do this intuitively. They dress in surprising, edgy ways.

But it's still familiar *enough*

They wear clothes. It's just the clothes are different. They wear jewelry. It's just the jewelry is gaudy.

It's novel—but familiar.

Conclusion:

We might claim we like new things.

But we only like new things if they remind us of something familiar.

This is why marketing anything means you need to research the market.

You need to understand what's familiar—so you can offer something novel.

That's all friends!

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