Written by: Simon Attard
Your Customer Has Already Decided, and You Have Not Said a Word
I have spent more than twenty years watching people decide, and whether it happens in a pitch room, on a shop floor, across a restaurant table or, increasingly, behind the cold glow of a phone screen, the pattern rarely changes, because we like to imagine that choosing a brand is a careful and reasoned affair in which our customers weigh us up, read the detail and arrive at a sensible verdict, when in reality the whole thing is a great deal quicker, rather less flattering and far more useful to understand once you have made your peace with it. People decide whether they trust you almost the instant they lay eyes on you, and nearly everything that follows is simply them hunting for reasons to justify a feeling they had already settled upon.
A Tenth of a Second Is All You Actually Get
The research on this is startling enough to be worth pausing over, because when the psychologists Janine Willis and Alexander Todorov, working at Princeton, sat people in front of unfamiliar faces for a mere tenth of a second and asked them to judge how trustworthy each one seemed, the verdicts barely shifted even after other participants were handed all the time in the world, so that more time turned out to buy not wiser judgement but deeper conviction in the snap decision the mind had already reached in a heartbeat. Something almost identical happens to your website, only faster still, since in a now famous study from Carleton University, Gitte Lindgaard and her colleagues found that visitors form an opinion of a page in roughly fifty milliseconds, quicker than a blink, and that this first flicker of a reaction quietly colours how they go on to judge everything that follows, an effect psychologists call the halo and one that behaves as both a gift and a threat, since to look considered and capable in that opening instant is to be granted the benefit of the doubt, whereas to look rushed or cheap is to spend the rest of the visit being quietly convicted of it.
Why Your Design Is Talking Long Before You Are
Once you sit with that, it reframes the entire contest, because your colours, your typography, the quality of a single photograph and the calm or the clutter of a layout are all read and ruled upon long before your carefully chosen words are ever given the chance to speak, and people assume, not unreasonably, that the care you show in how you present yourself is a fair preview of the care you will bring once they have handed over their money. None of this is as shallow as it first sounds, either, for trust is really just the shortcut our brains lean on to manage risk, and risk is the quiet reason a warm prospect turns cold, so that when faced with a choice the mind would far rather not reason everything out from first principles and instead reaches for fast signals of competence and safety and rests its weight upon them, which is precisely why a brand that looks coherent and cared for lowers the sense of risk while a brand that looks thrown together raises it, even when the business behind that scruffy surface happens to be quietly excellent, an outcome that is unfair and entirely human in equal measure and that will not change simply because we wish it would.
The Experts Who Think I Am Overstating It
I would be doing you a disservice, though, if I pretended the experts all sang from the same hymn sheet, because they do not, and the disagreement between them is worth hearing out, given that Professor Byron Sharp and the team at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, whose work has reshaped how serious marketers think, would gently suggest I am making rather too much of the first impression, since in their reading brands grow less through instant emotional trust than through being noticed and easily remembered, what they term distinctiveness and mental availability, so that when the moment to buy finally arrives it is your name that surfaces first, while others again, among them the Oxford academic Felipe Thomaz, have gone further still and questioned whether any single grand theory of growth truly deserves the confidence we tend to place in it.
Why Being Remembered and Being Trusted Are Partners, Not Rivals
My own sense, for what it is worth, is that both of these things are true at the very same time, and that is exactly where the subject becomes interesting, because Sharp is quite right that no measure of instant charm will rescue a brand nobody can bring to mind, and yet being remembered and being trusted are not two rivals competing for the same chair so much as partners working the same room, which means that a brand which is at once instantly recognisable and instantly credible has quietly won the hardest part of the sale before a single word has been exchanged, the first impression having opened the door and consistency, repeated until it hardens into familiarity, being the thing that keeps that door from swinging shut again.
The Unglamorous Habit That Quietly Wins the Sale
That, in the end, is the unglamorous heart of the matter, since the businesses that win are seldom the loudest or the cleverest in any given week but rather the ones that keep showing up looking and sounding like themselves, everywhere and without fail, until recognition softens into comfort and comfort quietly becomes preference, whereas scattered marketing, with its sharp post sitting beside a tired one and its beautiful website next to a neglected profile, achieves precisely the reverse by sending mixed signals that the human brain reads first as uncertainty and then, inevitably, as risk. So let me be plain that none of this amounts to a gentle observation about looking pretty, because trust earned in that first glance is money in every sense that matters, shortening the sale, softening the wrangling over price and loosening tongues when the time comes for a recommendation, and that, rather than applause, is the return good branding genuinely pays, arriving as a smoother, shorter and warmer path from the instant of attention to the moment somebody finally says yes.
What This Looked Like for a Real Malta Brand
This is the very thinking we brought to our work for Investate (https://wearemyc.com/case-study/investate/), a newcomer to Malta’s financial services market in which trust is not a pleasant extra but the whole proposition, for nobody hands their savings to a brand that seems unsure of itself, and so we built an identity, an out of home presence and a brand film designed to radiate credibility in that first unguarded second, with the result that the company now walks into every conversation already doing the persuading before anyone has so much as opened their mouth; and the lesson travels a good deal further than finance, because whatever you happen to sell, you would do well to be clear about who you are, to say it consistently, to show real proof in the shape of real faces and real work, and to cut without sentiment anything that looks tired or uncertain, knowing that in those first fifty milliseconds a single weak detail will always
shout louder than your finest paragraph. Your customers, then, are making up their minds about you long before they decide whether to buy, and while that verdict is fast, instinctive and largely visual, nearly every ingredient of it sits within your control, so that although you can never slow the moment down, you can, with a little care and a great deal of consistency, make very sure of what it finds.
How MYC Delivers This
At MYC we turn this psychology into brands that are believed at a glance, having built for Investate an identity that earns trust before a word is spoken and shaped for names such as GROHE and Mobil 1 the websites and content that carry that trust all the way through to the sale, so if you would like your own brand to be trusted in the first few seconds rather than merely noticed, come and see how we work at https://wearemyc.com/portfolio/.