Cognitive Ease

[SenseiSteve]

You know I'm always searching the Internet for tips on marketing, and yesterday I ran across an interesting video on cognitive ease which caught my attention. Here's the link

It's just over 8 minutes long, but as I watched it, it made more and more sense. For example, members here who consistently post value-add threads and comments are perceived by me as experts in this industry (cognitive ease). It's the same why firms like Dr. Pepper and Pepsi run so many ads, even though everyone on Earth probably knows of their product.

I think web hosting providers who only post advertisements on hosting forums are missing a huge opportunity to brand themselves, but maybe I'm wrong.

Your thoughts ...

 

[John @ S4]

I didn't see this post here, so I answered it elsewhere, but I'm going to cross-post my same answer here because this is my favourite hosting forum

I'll start off with an aside, this is a great video that explains concepts really nicely, I wasn't familiar with the channel but took a look at some of their other content and there are a lot of really interesting things that I don't have time to watch right now but do want to go back to.

Cognitive Ease is a really powerful thing, it's the whole basis of the idea of 'no publicity is bad publicity' - which is a sweeping generalisation and is completely untrue but with a basic principle that is correct. We all do, whether we think we are informed or not, actually pay more attention to brands that we are familiar with, and which have visible spokespeople who sound like they know what they are talking about.

To build it you do need to be active in a lot of different places, rather than just in one very specific set of media channels. This was clearly much easier a few decades ago than it is today because people now have an attention span that is spread much wider due to the sheer volume of media out there to consume, but again the basic concept is still very true.