The power of 3’s!

A few years ago I stumbled across a fascinating website from a New Zealand gentleman called Sean D'Souza. Sean’s website is http://www.psychotactics.com and he offers another perspective on marketing from a psychological perspective.

One of the marketing techniques Sean promotes is the idea of the Power of ‘3’s; it’s something I’ve never forgotten and I try to integrate into my blog writing week, after week, after week.

For some reason, our brains really love 3’s – ABC, 123, The 3 Musketeers... you get the picture.

We understand and retain communications more readily when we’re fed 3 at a time. If you start to bombard people with, say 10 marketing messages in a row, retention drops off significantly.

The idea is to look at your communications quite simply. So if you’re a designer, use just 3 colours, 3 columns, or 3 elements per design.

If you’re a marketer, try cutting back your ‘feature list’ to three main benefits (or at least pull out the best 3 and highlight them separately).

Don’t use more than three fonts per design, and keep the visual elements in a design to just 3 main ones.

I really like using ‘threes’ in my writing, particularly when I’m putting together a proposal or helping to write web copy. It really can make the page ‘sing’! If there’s a benefit to a product, I’ll either increase it to three, or cut it back to three if there are more...

So for example, in a proposal I might write, “...following our SEO process, your website will rank highly, it will be found and it will drive new business.”

Sometimes I might bullet point key benefits into ‘threes’.

Example:

...your new website will:

1. rank highly
2. be found
3. drive new business

Breaking down your messages into three’s helps your reader absorb your message and just seems to ‘ring true’ every time.

Visit Sean’s Power of Three’s page here to learn more...