“Food, Faces and F**ks”: The Holy Grail of Messaging?

I first heard about 42courses after reading Rory Sutherland’s marvellous book, Alchemy.

(The link takes you to the paperback copy on Amazon, but I bought the hardback version from a ‘proper’ bookshop.

You can probably see from the photo below why I was attracted to it.  It’s blingy – so much so that you can see my reflection in the cover – and being from Essex, I’m hardwired to enjoy bling.  Plus I was intrigued by “ideas that don’t make sense”.)

Railing beautifully against all things mundane and logical, the book introduced me to behavioural science – or: why do we do what we do? – and switched on a light in my brain.  I wanted to keep it shining, so I looked up  ‘behavioural science courses’ online, and the rest is history.

Not only have I completed 12 courses and counting, but I was also invited to be a guest on the 42courses Podcast.   I “ummed”, “ahhed”, and “erred” all the way through my episode, though, because I was so bloody nervous.  If I were you, I’d choose a different one to listen to.

Anyway, the most recent 42course I’m taking, Behavioural Science for Effective Messaging, contained an interesting nugget of information about “food, faces, and f**ks”.

(I’m hoping you know what f**ks means.  If you don’t, I can only assume you’ve led an extremely sheltered life up to now.)

The three Fs, as they shall henceforth be known, are primal stimuli that our brains are hardwired to take notice of.

Why?

We’re bombarded with so much information every day, that some of it must be filtered out.  Your brain’s ‘bouncer’ therefore directs your limited conscious attention towards what it judges to be the most important.

And so, from this particular lesson I learned that:

• People more quickly recognise food items than non-food items.
• When a scene contains a face, eye-tracking shows that, over 80% of the time, people look at the face first.
• Ads with partial or full nudity produce more brain activity.

All of this is why you should think about which pictures you use to illustrate your ads, your blog posts, and your social media messaging.

It’s also why I deliberately chose a photo of a face to illustrate last week’s blog post.

On social media, that post received a modest increase of attention, compared with the last few blog posts I’d shared.  While I’d like to think this was because of my incredible writing, let’s face it, it probably was the cute doggie what did it.

Granted, this wasn’t a particularly in-depth experiment.  But as you probably noticed, I’m trying it again this week with ‘food’.

(Next week should be interesting.)

P.S. I highly recommend you try a 42course.  Not only do they fill your brain with compelling ideas, they’re so much fun that you won’t feel like you’re ‘learning’.

You can also get 10% off your chosen course by using this code: 607662-42