Behavioral economics & viral marketing case studies
Psychology of Colors Playbook Details Guide Research Examples
Humor Effect 
Details
Humor Effect means we remember things better when they make us laugh. A joke, a funny twist, or a light tone sticks in the mind far longer than something serious and flat.
Stories & humor are the ultimate shortcuts to deeper connections and earning trust of your customers. Humor bypasses skepticism.
Think of seeing a billboard with a clever joke. Even if you glance at it for a second, the line stays with you, while dozens of normal ads disappear instantly.
In marketing this bias shapes brand voices, ads, emails, and social posts. Humor boosts attention, recall, and shareability because it gives the brain a little reward for paying attention.
Humor Effect 
Guide
Humor Effect 
Research
This meta-research from 1992 reviews dozens of studies on how humor works in advertising.
Humor grabs attention very well but does not always convince people. About 24% of TV ads used humor, and 94% of advertisers said humor is an effective way to get attention, while 55% of research directors said humor works better than non-humor ads for attention.
Humor consistently lifts attention, but its effect on understanding the message is mixed, with:
Humor also does not guarantee stronger persuasion, although one analysis from 1982 found that 31% of humorous ads performed above average in persuasion tests.
The strongest finding in the entire review comes from the role of liking. A large 1991 study with almost 15,000 interviews showed that liking a commercial predicted which ad would win in sales 87% of the time, and a simple like-or-not-like measure predicted success 93% of the time.
People who liked a commercial a lot were also twice as likely to be persuaded. Humor supports this effect because when people felt an ad was funny or clever, it predicted success 53% of the time, while calling an ad boring predicted failure 73% of the time.
Overall, humor is great for getting attention and increasing liking, and since liking is one of the strongest predictors of sales, humor can indirectly make ads more effective, especially when the humor is connected to the product and used for simple, low-involvement decisions.
Humor Effect 
Examples
Their first ad used deadpan humor, swearing, and absurd scenes to explain a boring product: razor subscriptions. The humor made the message unforgettable, “Our blades are f***ing great.”.
Result: over 12k orders in 48 hours and a company later sold for $1B.
After the 2008 shoe-throwing incident became global meme material, Alex Tew created a funny browser game called Sock and Awe in just 3 hours.
The humor made it instantly shareable. By day 3, it had been played 1.4M times, and by day 6, the site reached 9M visitors.
The game was sold within days, and the team later used the traffic to collect 120k emails, helping them launch their next project (PopJam).
Old Spice used surreal, rapid-fire humor that completely broke deodorant-ad conventions. The absurd style made the brand memorable to both men and women, turning a dying product line into a cultural hit. Sales jumped 125% year-over-year after the campaign.
Curiosity Gap Details
Curiosity Gap means we feel a strong pull to fill in missing information. When we see a hint without the full answer, our brain wants to close the gap.
Think of reading a headline that teases a surprising fact but doesn’t give the full story. You click because the missing piece bothers you just enough to take action.
In marketing this gap drives engagement. Teasers, questions, partial reveals, and open loops make people lean in because they want to know what comes next.
Curiosity Gap Guide
Curiosity Gap Research
In a study from 2007, people chose between a sure thing (cash) and a mystery prize. When the researchers gave them just a little information about the mystery box (not the whole truth), curiosity shot up. People became more than twice as likely to choose the unknown prize instead of the cash. That small tease created a curiosity gap, and the urge to learn the missing info pushed them to take the risk.
A large analysis of 8,977 headline A/B tests found that headlines with an optimal “curiosity gap” achieved the highest CTR.
Upworthy’s data showed that only ~9% of very vague headlines gained clicks by adding info, whereas over 50% of overly detailed headlines actually saw ~5–10% fewer clicks.
This supports Loewenstein’s information-gap theory: headlines that leave readers guessing (not too little, not too much) can boost engagement.
Research on email marketing showed that using curiosity gap can lift open rates. In one study, 33% of recipients opened an email solely due to a compelling, curiosity-inducing subject line. Adding personalization further amplified this effect - personalized, curiosity-gap subject lines saw open rates climb by ~35%.
Curiosity Gap Examples
Ogilvy put a cheap eye-patch on a perfectly normal model wearing Hathaway shirts. This made people instantly curious about the model.
The first ad ran in The New Yorker in 1951. Within a week, every Hathaway shirt in New York was sold out.
In 2004, Heyah flooded cities with a strange red hand logo and a website called “nadchodzi.pl” (“it’s coming”) - but didn’t reveal the brand.
People kept asking “What is this? Who is behind it?” The curiosity gap exploded, driving 1.2M unique visitors before launch.
When the reveal finally came, Heyah got over 300k users within the first month.
Picture Superiority Effect Details
Picture Superiority Effect means we remember images much better than words. Our brains process visuals faster, deeper, and with far less effort than text.
Think of seeing a stunning mountain photo that takes your breath away versus reading a paragraph describing the same view. The picture hits instantly, while the text needs work.
In marketing this effect makes visuals do the heavy lifting. Photos, icons, and simple graphics stick in memory, boost understanding, and make ideas feel more real.
Picture Superiority Effect Guide
Picture Superiority Effect Research
The Picture Superiority Effect was demonstrated in a 2008 study that asked participants to memorize random pairs of words and random pairs of images.
The pairs were then reorganized, and participants were asked to spot what changed. The experiment showed that people were overwhelmingly better at identifying the differences in image pairs than in word pairs.
John Medina found that people remember only about 10% of plain text after 3 days.
But when the same info is shown with a relevant image, people remember around 65% of it 3 days later.
According to marketing-industry influencer Krista Neher, the human brain can process images up to 60,000 times faster than words.
Picture Superiority Effect Examples
1. Infographics and visual content
Infographics work because people read and remember visuals faster than text. Charts and icons turn messy data into something you can understand in one glance, which is why infographic posts get shared way more than essays.
Kickstart Side Hustle became a real business thanks to the sketch cards. Before them, people liked the idea but didn’t feel much. Once they saw the sketches, they loved it. The concepts suddenly felt tangible, and easier to understand and remember.
Priming Details
Priming is about little cues that quietly guide your thoughts and choices before you even know you’ve made them. A single word, color, or image can quietly plant an idea that changes how you think, feel, or act next, all without you realizing it.
It’s not manipulation, it’s mechanics. Your brain connects new info to what it’s already seen, so the first cue changes how you see everything that follows.
When people see the word “old,” they walk slower. When they see “money,” they act more selfish. That’s priming. Small triggers shaping big behavior.
A green “Buy” button feels safe. A clean design feels trustworthy. A countdown timer feels urgent.
Priming works because your brain fills in the blanks, and it never realizes it’s doing it.
Priming Guide
Priming Research
A study from 1999 explored the influence of music on wine selections. For two weeks, French and German music was played on alternate days in a wine store. On the days in which French music was played, French wines outsold German wines 5 to 1. On the days with German music, the German wines outsold French wines 2 to 1. In post-shopping surveys, most customers denied the music influenced them. The effect was largely subconscious.
Another study from 1999 showed that changing the website background affected visitor behavior. For example, the pennies image resulted in a longer focus on the product's price.
Priming Examples
1. Real Estate
Realtors often bake cookies or brew coffee before showings. Smell primes warmth, comfort, and “home.” Buyers rate the same house higher without realizing why.
IKEA forces you through fully furnished rooms before you see individual products. You get primed with the finished lifestyle, not prices or parts. When you later see shelves, lamps, and rugs, buying feels obvious.
Attentional Bias Details
Attentional bias means your brain pays more attention to things that feel important or emotional to you and quietly ignores everything else. That’s why two people can look at the same scene and notice completely different things.
It’s not that you can’t see everything. It’s that your brain won’t let you. Attention is a limited resource, and your mind invests it where emotion or expectation tells it something “matters.”
Think of it like when you buy a red car. Suddenly, every street seems full of red cars. They were always there, but now your mind flags them as important, so they pop out everywhere.
In marketing, if your ad, offer, or headline doesn’t match their current focus, it might as well be invisible.
Attentional Bias Guide
Attentional Bias Research
In the study, people were asked to focus on one conversation while ignoring another. In the ignored channel, scientists secretly slipped in the person’s own name or random weird words, like “the pizza ate the cat,” etc.
Around 29% of people instantly noticed their name, even though they were told to ignore that audio. Their attention jumped without conscious control. Performance on their main task even dropped when their name appeared. But when those same researchers threw in unexpected or nonsensical words, almost nobody noticed. Zero effect on focus, zero recall later.
That’s attentional bias in action. Your brain is tuned to spot personally relevant cues, like your own name, threats, or anything emotionally charged, even when it's noisy. It’s not about what’s surprising or weird, it’s about what matters to you.
Millets and Blacks (an outdoor retail brands in the UK) adopted a product-recommendation engine from Barilliance Personalized Recommendation Engine to personalize on-site product suggestions.
The study tested a dynamic recommendation engine that tracked each visitor’s behavior (what products they viewed, categories they explored, and even weather-related intent), then showed tailored suggestions in real time.
Instead of showing generic “people also bought” items, the site adapted instantly to each user’s focus, leveraging the brain’s natural tendency to pay more attention to information that feels personally relevant. The Attentional bias made users subconsciously filter out generic content and focus on items that matched their goals or interests.
Users who clicked on personalized recommendations were 277–332% more likely to buy, and those recommendations generated around 17–19% of total sales.
In an A/B test, simply replacing default recommendations with personalized ones lifted conversions by +10%.
Attentional Bias Examples
1. Starbucks app
The app tracks when you’re near a Starbucks and uses real-time data to send personalized offers based on your usual orders, replacing generic discounts with deals that match your actual drink and snack preferences.
Checked Airbnb spots in Dubai once? You’ve just triggered an army of retargeting ads chasing you around the internet, each one testing a different angle to figure out what’ll finally make you book.
Von Restorff Effect Details
Von Restorff Effect (aka the isolation effect), is people's tendency to remember things that stand out. It's your brain’s spotlight for what stands out. When a single thing looks different from the rest, your attention locks onto it automatically. The brain’s wired to notice contrast because it might mean something important.
Think of a grocery shelf with 20 blue cereal boxes, one bright yellow. Guess which one you notice first.
If you want people to notice and remember something, make it unique in its context. However, if you make everything unique, then nothing is. It’s about creating a focal point. As the adage goes, “When the world zigs, zag.” That unexpected zag is what people remember and often, what they talk about later.
Von Restorff Effect Guide
Von Restorff Effect Research
The Von Restorff Effect takes its name from Hedwig von Restorff, a German psychologist who, back in 1933, ran an experiment on memory. She gave people lists of similar items, but made one of them stand out - a word in a list of numbers, or one item in a different color.
As a result, people remembered that odd one out way better than the rest.
This became known as the isolation paradigm, when one element breaks the pattern, your brain can’t help but lock onto it. Over time, researchers realized it’s all about distinctiveness and attention. When something stands out from its surroundings, your brain spends more energy on it, noticing it, encoding it, and remembering it.
A recent test by behavioral consultant Richard Shotton gave 500 people a list of 15 numbers where one number was in a different color. Later, respondents were 30 times more likely to remember the distinctive colored number than any of the others.
In one case study, an online store altered its design so that the primary CTA button was isolated in color (the only element of that hue on the page). The result was a reported 230% increase in click-through rate on that button.
The famous Purple Cow philosophy, coined by Seth Godin, ties directly to the Von Restorff Effect. It's all about being remarkable, creating something so unique, bold, or unexpected that people can’t help but notice and talk about it.
In a field full of ordinary brown cows, a purple one instantly stands out. That’s the entire idea. If you blend in, you’re invisible. If you stand out, you’re memorable.
Von Restorff Effect Examples
1. Blendtec
Blendtec, with their mega viral marketing campaign "Will It Blend?" kickstarted their company, and changed the way people perceive seemingly boring products such as a blender
The Blair Witch Project was the first documentary-style horror. With 60k budget movie became the fifth highest-earning independent film of all time, earning $248.6M worldwide.
Remember this $5k budget viral ad? It got 12k recurring clients within 48h. And became the foundation for its $1B acquisition 4 years later.
Selective Attention Details
Selective attention means your brain focuses on one thing at a time while ignoring the rest. Like a spotlight that lights up what matters most right now and leaves everything else in the dark.
It’s not that you don’t see or hear the rest. You do, your brain just deletes it before you notice. That’s why you can read this sentence while ignoring the hum of your fridge or the pressure of your chair.
In marketing, this filter is both your biggest enemy and your biggest ally. People don’t process everything you show them, only what stands out against the noise. If your design, headline, or hook doesn’t trigger that internal spotlight, it might as well not exist.
Selective Attention Guide
Selective AttentionResearch
In one of psychology’s most famous experiments, Simons & Chabris (1999) asked participants to watch a short video of people passing basketballs and count the number of passes made by one team. Halfway through the clip, a person in a full gorilla suit casually walked into the scene, stopped, beat their chest, and walked off.
But about 46% of viewers didn’t notice the gorilla at all. Their attention was completely occupied with the counting task. The brain filtered out anything unrelated to the defined goal, even something as absurd and attention-grabbing as a gorilla.
Researchers wanted to know what really happens when several products fight for your attention. Does simply looking at something longer make you like it more, or even choose it?
They ran three eye-tracking experiments where people looked at a few products side by side. The team measured exactly how long each product held attention and how that attention bounced between options.
The results:
The more visual attention a product got, the more people liked and chose it. It seems attention can create preference. Once something hooks your gaze, your brain starts backing it up with reasons to like it. If your product doesn’t win at first glance, it’s already halfway to losing the sale.
Selective Attention Examples
1. Share a Coke
Coca-Cola printed people’s first names on bottles. Consumers went crazy hunting for their name. By tapping into selective attention (we’re highly attentive to our own name), Coke saw a 7% bump in consumption among young adults and a 2% increase in US sales, reversing a decade-long decline.
Heyday Canning Co., a brand known for selling flavored beans, organized a pop-up event in New York City where visitors couldn’t pay with money, only with cans of beans.
The campaign quickly went viral. Their TikTok account saw a 300% spike in followers, over 13k profile views, and one creator’s video reached 750k views. In total, videos from the event generated 230k+ views on Heyday’s own TikTok.
The stunt took up around 30% of their Q4 marketing budget, but the payoff was huge. Using beans as currency broke through selective attention barriers. No other canned food brand was doing anything even close.
Visual Hierarchy Details
Visual hierarchy is a design concept that means to guide people’s eyes to what matters most, using size, color, and contrast to show them where to look first.
Take Facebook's interface. It's mostly blue and white, then BAM, that red notification dot grabs your attention.
Our brains naturally scan in patterns (usually F or Z shapes on websites), instantly sorting what matters from what doesn't.
Good visual hierarchy makes this easy by pushing the important stuff forward (big headlines, bold buttons) while keeping secondary info quieter.
People find what they need faster and don't get paralyzed by choice overload. It's like handing their eyes a roadmap - and when you nail it, you're basically triggering those snap decisions our brains make on autopilot.
Visual hierarchy transforms "wait, where do I even look" into "oh yeah, that's obviously where I click."
Visual Hierarchy Guide
Visual HierarchyResearch
Visual hierarchy was born out of early 20th-century Gestalt psychology, developed by Wertheimer, Koffka, and Köhler in Germany.
Gestalt means “form” or “shape,” and its main idea was simple: people don’t see visuals as isolated parts but as structured wholes. The famous principle “the whole is other than the sum of its parts” reshaped how we understand perception.
The key Gestalt laws - proximity, similarity, continuity, closure, and figure-ground - describe how the brain naturally organizes and ranks what it sees. Modern designers turned these principles into a playbook for controlling attention, arranging elements by size, color, contrast, and placement so every viewer’s eyes move exactly where intended.
Eye-tracking studies show people read in an F-shape - about 80% of their first looks go to the top-left area. They scan across the top, then down the left, and basically ignore the bottom-right mess. That’s why headlines and CTAs up there get 2–3x more attention.
Ads placed along the edges hold attention about 25% longer than center banners, because they fit the way our eyes move, not fight it.
Native or blended ads (inline or near the bottom) get noticed 47% faster and reach 451% more people since they flow with our natural eye paths.
Even bottom-above-fold spots perform great. They’re seen as attention-grabbing but not annoying and double recall rates.
Long story short, uing weird or unexpected ad spots can boost attention by 25-451% .
When users rated a design as good, their eyes moved in almost the same way. They were tracked through Fréchet distance, which basically measures how similar movement patterns are.
Great visual hierarchy doesn’t just look clean, it actually guides everyone’s eyes in the same order (e.g. headline → key visual → CTA).
Bad layouts, on the other hand, scatter attention. People start looking all over the place, which screams confusion and zero clarity.
Sensory Adaptation Examples
1. Apple
Apple's iPhone pages show brutal visual hierarchy discipline. Product images dominate (60-70% of viewport), key features get massive headlines, technical specs are tucked away smaller at the bottom. This hierarchy matches how people actually buy, emotion first (big beautiful product), rational justification later (specs). Apple's conversion rates consistently outperform competitors partly due to this religiously maintained hierarchy.
This is a visual hierarchy applied to topography in action.
Before: everything looks flat. Same font size, same weight, same priority. The message is there, but your eyes don’t know where to go first.
After: the hierarchy kicks in. Larger headlines grab attention, supporting text guides the flow, and the paragraph becomes effortless to read. Same words, same font, but now the design actually speaks.
Many SaaS websites put a single, bold headline and a bright CTA button front and center. When Basecamp redesigned with one big tagline and a contrasting signup button, they saw improved conversions (the CTA couldn’t be missed).
Psychology of Colors Details
Psychology of Colors means colors trigger fast emotional reactions that shape how we judge a brand or product. We don’t analyze the color, we feel it.
Think of how a bright red button instantly feels urgent, while a soft blue page feels calm and trustworthy. Nothing in the text changed, but the color alone shifts how we respond.
In marketing this bias guides brand palettes, call-to-action buttons, packaging, and product categories. Colors can signal energy, safety, luxury, freshness, or danger in a single glance, so choosing them shapes how people behave.
Psychology of Colors Guide
Psychology of different colors
Psychology of Colors Research
This is a summary of different studies originally collected and published in an article by Jill Morton, 2019, at Colorcom:
Psychology of Colors Examples
Heinz EZ Squirt was a brightly colored ketchup (green, purple, blue) launched in 2000.
Kids loved the fun colors, and parents bought it because it felt playful and different.
The product exploded with 10M bottles sold in the first 7 months, and 25M total.
But by 2006 it disappeared. Parents realized it looked fun but was too artificial and unhealthy.
The fad ended, but the case shows how color alone can create massive demand, especially for children.
In 1992, PepsiCo launched Crystal Pepsi, a clear cola designed to signal purity, softness, and health. The color alone made people curious. Clear cola felt clean and modern compared to the dark, sugary look of regular sodas.
This color-based positioning worked extremely well. Crystal Pepsi made $470M in its first year, becoming one of the most successful soft-drink launches ever.