Tomorrow is Earth Day. Did you hear that the founder of Earth Day killed his girlfriend and composted her body? This event has been going on for 52 years and every year about this time, I get this same news story pushed at me. Even though the story has been debunked, it still circulates on some of the most popular news and magazine websites.

How is it that people believe such outlandish stories? It comes down to human nature. Part of it has to do with our natural curiosity – we cannot turn away from sensational headlines like this. We see them and we want to click on them. The other part is we tend to believe what we hear time and again. This has been dubbed the Illusory Truth Effect. It simply states that the more times we hear something that is false, the more we tend to believe it is true, even if we initially questioned the integrity of the statement. It is a technique that is often used in marketing political and social idealism. It is also commonly used to market brands. We believe what we hear over and over again.

You may think people have wised up to fake news. They may have once fallen for outlandish marketing techniques like the illusory truth effect, but times have changed. People are much wiser and too skeptical of falsehoods to be that gullible, right? Think again. If anything, people are more likely to fall for a lie today because the new media is so much faster in delivering information and we are bombarded by marketing messages each day. Some experts have claimed we process in excess of 135,000 bits of information every single day!

Did you catch what I just did? I gave you an outlandish number that you may be inclined to believe simply because you read it in this blog but let me assure you that I made the 135,000 bits of information up. Honestly, did you believe it? Here is my point: we are pulled to the most outlandish statements, and we believe what we hear repeated no matter how extreme they are. Our curiosity trumps our reason. If your marketing is not causing your target market to be curious enough to stop and look at your brand, you need to spice things up and catch their attention. Likewise, if you are not being repetitive in marketing, you are missing the point with your customers.

I often get customers who want their marketing to work from the start. There is a part that will work if you can pull in the attention of your target market. But the bigger impact marketing makes is the repetition of easy to remember phrases – brand positioning so that people believe what you tell them. You know you are being successful in marketing when your customers start to repeat it back to you.

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Earth Day Was Not Founded by Convicted Killer Ira Einhorn, by Stephen Silver, Inquisitir.com, April 22, 2019