Hey 👋 The Crew here.
Why do all cool words start with the letter “W?”
Win. Weekend. Wellness.
The best thing? We’re all going to experience all of these soon. But let’s first dive into some marketing psychology.
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Nirvana Fallacy
As the great French writer Voltaire once said, perfect is the enemy of good.
And yet, we still strive for perfection all the time.
From self improvement to job hunting and even to dating, seeking perfection is deeply ingrained in human desire and behavior.
People tend to have unrealistic expectations of existing things. We compare them to unrealistic, perfect counterparts.
It’s called the Nirvana fallacy.
Not after the band, of course, but after the Buddhist term for perfection.
In 1969, economist Harold Demsetz was disenchanted by government policy makers always presenting choices between ideal scenarios and existing arrangements.
He described it as “nirvana approach.”
It’s the same in any other part of life. You look at your newly designed landing page, and it’s good—but you want it to be perfect, even if it’s driving good conversions.
In marketing, your audience often approaches products with the same Nirvana mindset.
Yes, your product is good. But it’s not perfect. And even if you present it as such, you can’t outcompete whatever ideal a customer may have in their head.
So how do you overcome and even leverage the Nirvana mindset?
Three ways you can leverage the Nirvana fallacy
1) Go the “close to perfection” route
Can you please a perfectionist? Not really. Nor can you convince them your product is perfect—they will always compare it to something unrealistic.
But you can challenge their Nirvana bias by taking the “nothing is perfect but your product is darn close” route.
Take a perfect scenario that no product can achieve, and position yourself as getting close.
Guess who did that to huge success? Mastercard. Their “Priceless” campaign has been going for decades:
2) Shift the “perfection” focus
What if your audience can achieve perfection, but is seeking it in the wrong place?
You can divert their focus from searching for the ideal solution to providing a different solution that solves the same problem.
Sounds confusing? Well, here’s an example:
Bobbi Brown does a curious thing here. Despite selling skincare products, it diverts their audience into thinking that they’ve been looking for the wrong thing all along.
And it provides an alternative.
3) Showcase incremental improvements
Remember the Voltaire quote we mentioned earlier?
The Nirvana fallacy prevents us from evaluating the final product because we tend to look for perfection.
The solution is to show continuous, incremental improvements rather than the end result. The end result will never be good enough. But everybody loves being a part of the journey.
A good example is Nike’s “Better For It” initiative.
It resonates because it realistically portrays the effort and time it takes to achieve fitness goals—and contrasts the effort sharply with promotions that promise quick fixes or immediate results.
If you’ve ever wondered why building in public works so well, there’s your answer!
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CONSUMER BEHAVIOR: Are shoppers turning to AI when looking for products online? They might be. Data shows that by 2027, the number of users who leverage AI search first could increase sevenfold. And that’s just one of the interesting stats in this story—so check it out.
AI MARKETING: Speaking of AI… if you’re looking to leverage AI personalized product recommendation tools, make sure they explain to users why they’re recommending certain products. Apparently, it can boost your results significantly. Interesting.
TIKTOK: Now it’s serious. President Joe Biden just signed a bill that will ban TikTok unless China-based ByteDance divests the app—or in other words, sells it to an US company. TikTok goes the clock…
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ICYMI, last time we looked at the Outcome bias.
The “Perfectionist” Crew
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