How brands use friction to their advantage

Friction can be a good thing for marketing.
Yes – you read right – here is why:

Many companies build their success on reducing friction.
Amazon for example figured out people are much more likely to purchase the less they have to click on their mouse.

Frictionless environments are easy on our brain – they feed on our heuristics and if you are in that environment you should do everything to reduce the friction.

The lesser talked about companies, however, create friction deliberately to drive their success. As someone who has the mission to build holistic brands I believe we shouldn’t leave that out of our sight. I first got introduced to this idea by Robert Cialdinis book Presuasion and recently listened to the amazing Rory Sutherland in the Diary of a CEO Podcast by Steven Bartlett.

For example, most comparison sites like flight radar or german Check24 show you an animation of them “scanning through” sites to get you the best deal, when in fact you know a search engine like google can deliver you 100 000s of results in fractions of a second. We give the result of such a site much more credit than if it was done within a fraction of a second. This is marketing too.

Another example is, that people are a lot more likely to remember their appointments if they have to take note of them themselves, rather than being passed a note or sent an invitation. This is the well-theorized IKEA effect. We tend to give things, where we are involved in their creation/assembly, a lot more significance.

Another well-known friction point is scarcity, if something is desirable but scarce or hard to get by it becomes more attractive, we love things we can’t get – it is written into our bodies by Dopamine. Dopamine gets us excited about things even if we can’t get them.

Are there any other examples you can think of where friction made a product or service better?

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#marketing #branding #holisticmarketing #branding