The Quisenblog

Do you think you’d recognize a penny when you see one? Oh really? Well, click here, and take your best shot at picking out the actual penny:

Did you pick the correct one? Surprisingly, more people pick one of the other choices than the actual penny.

In your lifetime, you’ve probably handled thousands of pennies. Yet when it comes to picking one out of a “line-up,” you’re filled with uncertainly. Which way is Lincoln facing? Is the inscription “In God We Trust” or “The United States of America?” You need to be able to recognize a penny. But you don’t need to remember every detail.

Now imagine you’re sitting in front of your television, and you see a spot for an automobile. Later, you sort of remember seeing it, but for the life of you, you can’t remember if the spot was for Buick, Hyundai or Lincoln-Mercury.

This is the “Penny Dilemma” in its full glory. You don’t fail to pick the right one because you didn’t have enough exposure to it. You failed to pick it out because it was (believe it or not) too familiar. It looked too much like the 10,000 other car commercials you’ve seen this year.

We need precious few cues to decide the object we’ve been handed is a penny. Just as we need precious few cues the spot we’ve viewing is for a car, a dishwashing detergent or a can of dog food. I’ve seen something like this before, we think, so I don’t need to pay that much attention to it.

Remember this lesson next time you are tempted to run a communication that looks pretty much like what everyone else in the category is running. The familiar may be comfortable, but it also more often than not fails to break through.

Posted by Mickey

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Mickey Ramblings Buick, Hyundai, Lincoln-Mercury, target marketing