Hey, The good thing about being born curmudgeonly is that you grow into it. My list of pet peeves might fill a comically long scroll but what really grinds my goats is when some idea or theory or concept – often intended to just get you thinking a certain way – gets adopted as an immutable law of the universe. Especially if it leads authors to make bad marketing decisions. Maybe I chose the wrong line of work because marketing itself is a deeply unscientific world. It's a results-driven business, one with little appetite for academic rigor or sober reflection – especially when the dancefloor is heaving with dollar dollar bills. There's one particular myth you should watch out for. One which can ruin your marketing day if you take it too literally. Welcome to The Rule of 7. "What's that?" I hear you cry, from all the way over here. Well, don't Google it whatever you do because you will end up with 100 different answers. I'll define it a little loosely so it encompasses most of the versions I've heard over the years. Buyers need to hear a marketing message 7 times. You have probably heard some variation of this. Maybe using fancy-dan phrases like "customer touchpoints" or "brand experiences." You might even have heard some elaborate scientific justification for this. A Century of 7sThis idea is not just pervasive, but enduring – the concept is almost one hundred years old. It reminds me of one of my favorite Mark Twain quotes: A lie can get halfway around the world before the truth gets its boots on. Not least because Mark Twain almost certainly didn't say it – rather neatly proving his(?) point. Some ideas stick around because they are true or useful, others because they simply have been repeated so much that everyone assumes they are true or useful. Is there anything true or useful about the Rule of 7? Let's take a look, right after a quick work from our sponsor. August Sponsor: Grace BurrowesGrace Burrowes has kindly sponsored today's newsletter. Grace is a prolific New York Times and USA Today bestselling author and if you read historical romance I recommend checking out her website: If you are a romance reader, Grace has lots and lots of books to check out. Looking for a place to start? The Rogues to Riches series has over 10,000 reviews on Amazon alone - although it's worth noting that Grace's books are widely available. You can even buy direct from Grace herself. The History 7Like many OG marketing rules, the Rule of 7 was coined long before broadband, online purchasing, or digital ads existed. This is reason enough to be skeptical, in one sense, but the enduring nature of the Rule of 7 means there must be something there worth salvaging. But we are getting ahead of ourselves - let's look at why it became gospel in Ad Land. Back in the 1930s, old timey movie studios noticed that customers often needed to hear about a picture seven times before being convinced to go and watch it. And if you are wondering how they knew that or tracked that, well, those are good questions. It just felt true, I guess. But it felt really true over time and across different industries too - enough for the idea to survive a century of radical change. A long line of likely lads have tried to retrofit a scientific basis for this true-feeling hunch, with decidedly mixed results. A personal favorite is when modern-day funnel bros reference an academic paper from 1956 by George Miller entitled The Magical Number 7. Amusing because I actually studied that paper in grad school, And especially because it has little to say about marketing! (If you're curious, this paper was more about how many chunks of distinct information we can memorize easily - like digits in a phone number, rather than, say, how many Chevrolet "brand experiences" will drive us to the forecourt.) But it sounds good to drop. I guess. So why has this particular myth endured? What in this resonates with marketers so much? Which bits of it are the kernels of truth making the phrase so enduring? Most importantly, can we carve something useful out of all this to help us sell more books? (Spoiler: yes!) Let's chop it up. Myth: customers need to hear about a product 7 times before purchasing. Reality: Some customers sometimes need to hear about a product multiple times before purchasing. Yeah. Not quite as catchy or clear - as the truth often is. Indeed, the full title of that scientific paper referenced above was The Magical Number 7, Plus Or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information. And it was intended as a metaphor, not a cognitive law. Questionable academic citations aside, some questions remain: which customers? How many times? And in what situations? Precious little has been done on this in a rigorous academic sense - at least that would be directly applicable to books and authors. But we can glean the following: 1. Expensive products need more touchpointsYou need more convincing to by a car over a cupcake. Books are cheap in relative terms, so if you need to show someone an ad for a 99c book 7 times then something is wrong somewhere! 2. The Rule of 7 ignores the relative effectiveness of each attempt to attract buyers.A mediocre salesman might need several bites of the cherry even when you are an open goal and really interested in the product. A great one might close Cynical Cyril on the very first try. Takeaway here for authors? Make your ad copy, images, targeting, cover, price, blurb, and sample shine and readers might only need to see your ad once. Don't believe me? Then ask yourself this: does BookBub need to send its Featured Deals email seven times to shift thousands and thousands of books? Hell, no. 3. We are a delightfully diverse bunchDifferent things work on different people. Vary your marketing messages for improved performance. In other words, you can show the exact same ad to someone 3 times, 7 times, even 15 times and they might not buy. But show the same reader two different ads and the second version might be the one that nabs them. For example, if we are talking about Facebook Ads specifically, options to switch things up include: letterbox ads, square ads, carousel ads, and then variation in ad text, image, and headlines as well. There are lots of different ways to ensure you don't serve the same ad too many times to the same reader on a platform like Facebook. I won't go into the details of that point any further – it's probably worthy of a more Facebook-specific email itself. Your Big TakeawayThe aim here today is to slay one particular canard. And the Rule of 7 isn't the issue per se. It's the way it leads authors to persist with failing strategies, campaign, or ads – thinking that a reader just needs to see their cover 4 more times, when it's not right for the genre. Or thinking they just need to show a bad Facebook ad 5 more times and it will magically convert. Disreputable course sellers sometimes push this latter angle to deflect responsibility from their bad advice. Don't buy it. That's it for this week – 1000 words pecked out over four days is about all I can manage after picking up the plague back in Ireland (where I remain – trapped in the fever tent!). I'm channeling a lot of old man energy right now so I just wanted to sign off saying thanks for all the Facebook questions submitted – lots of stuff to work with and I'll pull something together for you soon. Dave P.S. Writing music this week is Rema with Calm Down. |
Friday, August 25, 2023
The misrule of 7
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