How to Make Customers Enjoy Your Product More Before They Even Buy

Can you make people value your product more before they have even tried it?

Yes, through framing. Decades of research on expectancy effects show that what people expect shapes what they actually experience. Tell them the right thing before they see your offer and you make them both more likely to buy and more likely to enjoy it. Same product, better result, purely from setting the frame first.

Expectancy effects, explained

An expectancy effect is when the outcome of an experience is shaped by what you expected going into it. If you expect something to be good, you are measurably more likely to find it good.

This is not a hunch. It has been demonstrated over and over, across taste tests, medicine, and countless other settings. Expectation quietly bends reality.

A problem for scientists, a gift for marketers

For researchers trying to run a clean experiment, expectancy is a nuisance, something to be controlled for so it does not skew the results.

In marketing it is the exact opposite. It is a lever you can pull on purpose, and pulling it lifts not just how much people buy, but how much they enjoy what they bought.

Framing does the work

The practical version of this is called framing. By telling a prospect the right thing before they ever reach your offer, you set a frame that makes the offer land better.

Framed well, your product can be judged superior to a rival's, sometimes before anyone has actually tried either one. The words around the thing change how the thing itself is experienced.

How to set the frame

Start from the end. Decide exactly what you want the customer to believe as they arrive at your offer, then plant that belief first: the story, the comparison, the bit of context that makes everything after it look better.

Get there before the price and the pitch, and you are no longer selling into a blank mind. You are selling into one that is already leaning your way.

Meet Brian

The frames people actually absorb are the entertaining ones, the stories and comparisons they enjoy rather than skim past, which is exactly where Brian, our AI Comedy Marketing Machine, comes in.

Brian helps you build funny, memorable content that sets the right frame before your offer arrives, using the same frameworks our writers use, so your product is judged favourably before the pitch even starts.

Take Brian for a spin and win the sale before the sales page loads.