Biz Psych: The Serial Position Effect

Business Pundit reports that a truly sharp marketer should understand how our brains process information.

The “Serial Position Effect” (developed by Hermann Ebbinghaus) assists by explaining how we remember items we see or hear in lists. Ebbunghaus discovered that things shown at the beginning of a list and at the end of a list are remembered best. This was later titled the “Primacy Effect,” and the “Recency Effect.”

How You Can Use It: This powerful concept can affect what the millions of people seeing your advertisements, listening to your radio promotion, or reading your sales letter, remember about your product.

If you have five benefits that your product provides over the competition, think long and hard about which ones you want to stick deep into your audience’s memory. Place those items at the beginning and end of your pitch.

This way, prospects will remember these benefits when they see your product on a shelf or think about the commercial they just saw.

Photo by lupoianfla.

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