How do you convince people to value your creation when they just learned what it is? Innovations are solutions to problems. 

Some solutions are wildly original, like the first Google algorithm or iPhone. These solutions violently shoved the industry in a new direction. Wherever Yahoo was going, wherever the Motorola Razor was going, it no longer mattered.

Sometimes those solutions push an industry forward in the direction it was already heading. Every few years, a new gaming console comes out with more power than the last generation. The PS4 becomes the PS5. There are some new features here and there, but the general idea stays the same. This is linear augmentation. 

How you market a product depends on which group you fall into. By far, the easiest group to market is the linear augmentation group. It does’t take much work for Sony to explain why you need to upgrade your PS4 into a PS5. Whenever creativity is linear, it becomes very easy for consumers to place value on them. 

The brain uses a system called “Anchor and Adjust” to arrive at value judgements. To figure out how much you value a PS5, your brain takes the value of the PS4 (the anchor) and then scales it up or down based on what it knows about the differences between the 2 (the adjustment). This is how your brain takes guesses. It’s how customers figure out what your product means to them. The Anchor & Adjust strategy isn’t simply one tool in your brains toolbox, it’s THE tool. 

The more linear this process is, the easier it is for your customers to figure out how much value to assign your idea. When you market your idea, you’re essentially trying to influence this process. You want customers to anchor themselves to high-value ideas and you want them to use adjustment so that they arrive at high value. This is pretty standard when it comes to marketing. 

The more revolutionary an idea is, the more difficult it becomes to market it. You can choose between being wildly different, but difficult to market, or you can choose to be marginally different, but easy to market. Said different, the more unique an idea is, the more difficult it becomes for customers to relate to it. This says nothing about the value of the product itself. This deals solely with your customer’s ability to relate to and value your creation. 

The Anchor & Adjust strategy is the only tool in your brain for this purpose. But what happens if change isn’t so linear? What happens when Google puts out their first algorithm or the iPhone comes out and revolutionizes the industry? How do we value something wildly new when we have nothing to anchor and nothing to adjust?

There’s nothing you can do to change how your customer’s brains evaluate your ideas. Like it or not, they absolutely must anchor and adjust to arrive at a valuation. When marketing, it’s our job as creative people to make sure that customers can successfully complete that process. Google didn’t become an overnight success. It took time for them to prove to the outside world that they had a better solution than Yahoo. However, the iPhone WAS an overnight success. People stood in lines overnight just to be one of the first people to get an iPhone 1. Why was there such a difference between Apple and Google? Before the iPhone launch, Apple has already spent considerable resources marketing the iPhone. Those resources weren’t spent telling customers what the iPhone DID. That would have been meaningless at the time. Apple focused on what the iPhone MEANT to people. They essentially interpreted the iPhone for their own customers. In a future episode, we’ll take a look at exactly how Apple did this.

Contrast this with Google. Google didn’t have the same resources as Apple when they started out. They couldn’t spend millions on advertising and teach others how to interpret their website. It was a slow process, but Google got it right. People had to teach themselves how to value Google. Users had to consistently arrive at better webpages that Yahoo found, and they had to do it quicker. Even a powerhouse like Google can’t ignore the law of Anchoring & Adjusting. 

The best thing we can do as creatives is to focus on what’s in front of us and get it right. As you’re creating today, think about how you can help your customers interpret your creations. When your customers view your work, what do they anchor to? What metaphor or analogy are they using? How do they go from having little information about who you are and what your product does, to actually valuing it above your competitors? 

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