Choice overload is part of why users choose familiar options, which is why leveraging familiarity can be a superpower to make your brand stand out in a sea of similar choices.
2. Modulates the way we perceive experiences
Familiarity bias is not only a process of resource optimization but also a real tool that has been shown to modulate attention, memory, brand preferences, donation behavior and even perceived taste when it comes to food.
Let’s take an example that touches me closely: as an Italian, my afternoon snack as a child was Nutella on bread, so every time I see another chocolate spread, I don’t even take it into consideration, because they all seem to have a different flavor. strange. Myself; however, my Spanish friend Isabel grew up on Nocilla and swears by it, saying that Nutella tastes bad in comparison.
But why does this happen? This is because familiarity can even modulate how we perceptually experience something, producing affect-influenced preferential behavior, as demonstrated by Wageningen University & Research in the Netherlands. The research team tested brand recognition and taste preferences in soy sauce and concluded that if the brand of the sauce was known and familiar, they reportedly liked it more. This taste preference also applied to the participants Thought they recognized the familiar mark but were incorrect. Correct or incorrect recognition of one’s familiar brand significantly increased satisfaction scores.
While theories of decision making and emotions are more complex and still under study, the power of familiarity on brand perception and preference has been demonstrated by numerous other studies over the past few decades (Monroe, 1976; Park & Lessig , 1981; Maria Sääksjärvi , Saeed Samiee, 2007; Ma, Wang & Da, 2021 to name just a few). For example, an iconic one by McClure and colleagues studied the behavioral preference shown for familiar brands by exposing participants to a blind taste test of Pepsi vs. Coca-Cola. When participants did not know the brand of drink they were tasting, the preference for one or the other was split evenly across the group; however, when drinks were labeled, ‘Brand awareness of one of the drinks had a dramatic influence on expressed behavioral preferences and measured brain responses.’ In short, both brand knowledge and cultural influences influence affect-based preferences.
3. It makes us feel safe
As we have seen, familiarity bias allows us to select options and free up cognitive resources for other important tasks, but what makes it so powerful in behavioral and financial decisions is something deeper: the perception of safety it can convey.
While undoubtedly a resource-effective mechanism, familiarity also modulates how we feel about brands, particularly the perceived trust we can place in them. And it is precisely the perception of security that can lead an occasional visitor to a trusted customer.
The familiarity heuristic is widely known in behavioral economics, with investors choosing local or national companies because they associate them with less risk. The same seems to happen for online businesses too. If you dig deeper into the Google Search Console (GSC) queries of some global companies, you will find that brand- and location-based keywords are generating a lot of searches and sometimes minimal click-through rates (CTRs), which is where they get may lose potential customers who they are evaluating their offers.