We are in a unique time of year. Days ago, we finished the midterm elections and now we are entering the Christmas shopping season. As we sit in between these two events, it is a good time to examine what works and what does not in marketing. That’s because marketing has a lot to do with the success of both the election of candidates and seasonal retail sales. When you boil it down, both use the same techniques to get us to buy what they are selling.

You may say, "I don’t want to hear another thing about the elections! I am sick of seeing election campaign ads!” That seems to be the sentiment amongst everyone. Unless you are running a political campaign, who wants to watch those ads? Everyone complains about them, but do you know why we are all bombarded by them? Because it works!

You may not yet be worked up about Christmas retail ads, but in a few weeks, you may have the same strong reaction. I can’t search for anything on the internet without seeing an ad. Every year, they start earlier. I get text messages, piles of mail, and emails from companies I have never heard of all trying to get me to buy their product as Christmas gifts. They send the same stuff again and again. Why? Because it works!

Why does it work? If I get so agitated by what I am seeing, why do I vote for candidates who have bombarded me with the same message? Likewise, why do I seek out gifts from the companies that have irritated me with their constant advertising push? There are two main reasons. First, we tend to remember what we hear time and again. Have you heard of the marketing rule of seven? It says that you have to hear a branded message at least seven times before you remember it. Beyond remembering, we also tend to believe what we have heard repeated to us again and again. Have you ever heard of the illusory truth effect? This is the theory that the more you hear something, the more you will believe it is true, even if you previously believed it to be untrue. Back in 1977, researchers at Temple and Villanova experimented with a group of people. They gave these subjects a list of sixty bits of trivia and asked them to mark them as either true or false statements. Two weeks later, they gave them a new list and asked them to again rate them as true or false. Of the sixty statements on the second list, twenty of them were the same as the first list. Two weeks later, a third list was given to the same people. Again, it contained sixty statements and the same twenty statements from the first list were repeated. What was discovered is more people found the twenty repeated statements to be true by the third round. The more they saw them, the more they believed them, even if they had marked them as false in the first round. The study concluded that people can be conditioned to believe nearly anything if they hear it repetitiously.

This is the reason someone can make an outlandish claim about their opponent in a campaign smear and you might think it total nonsense at first. But after you have heard it repeated several times, especially if you hear it from multiple sources, you begin to believe it is true. The same can be said about a retail brand. It is the best product on the market…so the slogan goes. After you hear that repeated several times, you begin to believe it.

The marketing impact of the illusory truth effect is quite powerful. This is the main reason repetition has always been used for recall; but remembering a fact is one thing, believing it is another. Advertising frequency is equal to brand credibility if you follow the research.