The Four-Letter Code to Selling Just About Anything

Most consumers are simultaneously neophilic, curious to discover new things, and deeply neophobic, afraid of anything that is too new. The best hit makers are gifted at creating moments of meaning by marrying new and old, anxiety and understanding. They are architects of familiar surprises

MAYA dictates that the ideal design sits between solutions that are completely novel and entirely familiar. Be too novel and customers will tune you out. Be too familiar and customers will look right past you. Or, in Loewy’s words, “The adult public’s taste is not necessarily ready to accept the logical solutions to their requirements if the soluti... See more

“I love it” at very first glance of a new brand means it’s too familiar (and explains why cohorts of new DTC brands all look the same). The better sign is when, at first glance, you’re a little uncomfortable - need to brew on it - and then gradually like it more and more…

Journalist Derek Thompson sums up this approach succinctly: “To sell something surprising, make it familiar; and to sell something familiar, make it surprising.”

This algorithmic repetition isn’t just a fashion trend; it’s the prevailing spirit across multiple cultural domains. What Mull observes about clothes, the critic Ted Gioia has been analyzing in music, where the Spotify era delivers what’s already tested and popular while the opportunities for new artists diminish. Instead of entering a process of d... See more