The Ambiguity Effect
Consumers Tend to Avoid Options That Look ambiguous or unclear.
Why is it so god damn difficult to persuade people to try new things or embrace new ideas?
Brazil is the country of FOOCHYBOWL (that’s how Brazilians pronounce football).
Football is such a national obsession in Brazil that Pelé once said, "Brazil eats, sleeps and drinks football!"
In 2019, a Brazilian television network called "Band" bought the broadcasting rights for the NBA in Brazil.
But Band executives knew that NBA had zero chances of competing with football audiences.
You see, humans hate uncertainty. We're hardwired to resist change and to try anything that looks new, different or unfamiliar. Especially if it looks unclear, confusing or too complex.
This ends causing us to prefer easy (but sometimes bad) options just because we're already familiar with the outcome.
In psychology this is known as the Ambiguity Effect.
To deal with it Band hired ad agency FCB Brazil.
But first, FCB's team meticulously studied every NBA and Brazilian football team. Their job was to find if there were interesting correlations between teams or players.
And touché! They were right on the money. Because FCB found 250 different data correlations.
Then they used these coincidences to come up with a campaign called "Fans will be Fans".
For the 250 different data correlations FCB crafted 2560 different online ads.
So whenever a Brazilian football fan read an article online about their fav football team, they'd be targeted with hyper-related ads.
For example, if you were a Palmeiras fan you'd be targeted with an ad showing why Palmeiras and Boston Celtics were similar.
And this was how Band saw a 16% increase in NBA ratings compared with the previous season.
As you can see, creatives know how to deal with the ambiguity effect.
To sell something new, find an angle that makes it feel familiar.
Takeaways for your business:
1. To sell something new, make it feel familiar. To sell something familiar, make it feel new.
Once upon a time in 2015, Visit Britain (the UK's national tourism agency) wanted to attract more Chinese tourists.
Unfortunately Chinese tourists seemed to prefer visiting America and Continental Europe.
So Visit Britain asks ad agency Ogilvy Beijing to help them promote the UK in a more welcoming way to Chinese people.
In China it is popular to give descriptive names to celebrities, places and foods.
So team Ogilvy Beijing decides to tap into this cultural truth in an unexpected way. To encourage Chinese people to visit the UK, Visit Britain told them they could give popular British landmarks a Chinese name.
So Visit Britain launches a campaign website where they invite the Chinese to rename 101 British landmarks. And promotes it via their Weibo and WeChat social media channels in China.
Soon the campaign became a topic of conversation in China and all over the World.
In ten weeks Chinese people suggested 13,000 new names.
And then Visit Britain selected the most memorable Chinese names for 101 different British tourist attractions.
So this was how The Gherkin (London's most famous skyscraper) became Xiao Huang Gua (Which in Chinese means "The Pickled Little Cucumber".)
Big Ben became Da Ben Zhong ("Big stupid clock.").
Stonehenge became Ju Shi Zhen ("Huge stone clusters").
Now hold your breath for the real world results of the "Great Chinese Names for Great Britain" campaign.
The campaign generated a 27% year-on-year increase in UK visits from Chinese tourists and a £22 million boost to the British economy.
2. Ambiguity makes your website copy invisible.
And it triggers the Ambiguity Effect, which could be impacting your conversion rates without you even knowing it.
Because it means that for some reason your copy isn’t clear enough and is triggering “the fear of the unknown”.
In other words, even if the reader adds a product to their shopping cart, their brains are probably still asking a bunch of What if questions like:
- What if they send me cheap crap from Ali Express?
- What if this website isn't legit and I'm just being scammed by some random dude in Russia?
- What if I give them my credit card details and they're stolen because... this website isn't safe enough and one day it might get hacked by the Chinese Mafia?
- What happens if my package gets lost between somewhere and nowhere?
That’s why a good copywriting technique to win over skeptics and their fears is to handle the #1 objection right there, in your headline.
Acknowledge what's stopping them from using your product, then give it a positive spin.
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