There’s no denying that 2023 was a bit of a rollercoaster for SEOs and marketers alike. We went through nine (at the time of writing) confirmed core updates, we witnessed the rise of the AI giants, and we’re now all looking at the Search Generative Experience (SGE) with a hint of diffidence, wondering how we can protect our efforts when it comes to our search strategy.

Now more than ever, the focus is on predicting how to adapt to this ever-changing landscape to make our brands stay relevant, but what if I told you that there’s only one thing that can guarantee your brand’s success, even when everything else is changing?

In this article, we’ll sprinkle a bit of cognitive science in the marketing mix and see how leveraging the familiarity bias can future-proof your (and any) brand.

For the romantics out there, a quote from ‘The Mill on the Floss’ by George Eliot summarises it quite well:

“What novelty is worth that sweet monotony where everything is known, and loved because it is known?”

The familiarity bias (or familiarity heuristic, depending on the stage of decision-making) is the human tendency to make decisions in favor of known options as compared to a new one. For example, it’s when you choose the same order at a restaurant or use the same e-commerce platform to do your online shopping even when it’s not consistently the most convenient.

Human decision-making is full of fallacies and systematic errors. We don’t have infinite cognitive resources, and yet we do have a lot of decisions to make every day, so we tend to rely on rules of thumb or mental schemes that we have built throughout our lives based on our own experiences, assumptions, cultural factors and, sometimes, the mere features of the options we are evaluating. While these errors don’t ensure that the best choice on paper is always made, they allow us to navigate the sea of decisions we face every day with relative ease.

The familiarity bias is one of these fallacies, and knowing how it affects our choices can be incredibly beneficial to our SEO and acquisition strategy to future-proof our brands in the long term.

There are three main reasons why we rely on familiarity for decisions, and they introduce new factors for brands to consider in their strategy:

1. It can spare our precious cognitive resources

Now more than ever, with so many options always at our fingertips (literally), the multitude of choices available can result in cognitive overload. And when we feel overwhelmed with the number of evaluations to make, a vast selection can be more detrimental than beneficial, leading to decision paralysis and, in turn, cart abandonment or delays in the purchase. (Manolica et. al, 2021; Adriatico et.al, 2022).

As marketers, we often have the power of ‘choice architects’ and can decide to facilitate the process for our customers, either by experimenting with different item positionings on the page or introducing custom segments that can shorten the journey and limit the number of choices someone has to make.

A few delivery companies, for example, leverage this by offering a ‘Repeat order’ or ‘Your favorites,’ which is an attractive way to make a quick choice for existing customers.

Choice overload is partially why users choose familiar options, and this is why leveraging familiarity can be a superpower to make your brand stand out in a sea of similar choices.

2. It modulates the way we perceive experiences

Familiarity bias is not only a resource optimization process 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 hits close to home for me: As an Italian, my childhood afternoon snack was Nutella on bread, so whenever I see any other chocolate spread, I don’t even consider it, as they all seem to taste weird to me; however, my Spanish friend Isabel grew up with Nocilla and swears by it, saying that Nutella tastes bad in comparison.

But why does that happen? It’s because familiarity can even modulate the way we perceptually experience something, producing an affect-biased preference behavior, as shown by the Wageningen University & Research in the Netherlands. The research group tested brand recognition and taste preference in soy sauce and concluded that if the brand of the sauce was known and familiar, it was reportedly liked more. This taste preference applied even when participants thought they recognized the familiar brand but were incorrect. Recognition, either correct or incorrect, of their own familiar brand significantly increased liking scores.

While theories of decision-making and emotions are more complex and still under investigation, the power of familiarity on brand perception and preference has been demonstrated by several other studies throughout the last 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 investigated the behavioral preference displayed for familiar brands by exposing participants to a blind taste test of Pepsi vs. Coca-Cola. When participants did not know the brand of the drink they were tasting, the preference for one or the other was split equally in the group; however, when the drinks were labeled, ‘brand knowledge for one of the drinks had a dramatic influence on expressed behavioral preferences and on the measured brain responses.’ In short, both brand knowledge and cultural influences bias preference based on affect.

3. It makes us feel safe

As we have seen, the familiarity bias allows us to skim down options and free cognitive resources to allocate to other important tasks, but what makes it so powerful in behavioral and financial decisions is something more profound – the perception of safety it can convey.

While it is undoubtedly a resource-effective mechanism, familiarity also modulates how we feel about brands, especially the perceived trust we can put in them. And it is precisely the perception of safety that can lead a casual visitor to a trusted customer.

The familiarity heuristic has been widely known in behavioral economics, with investors choosing local or domestic companies as they associate it with less risk. The same seems to happen for online businesses, too. If you dig into the Google Search Console (GSC) queries of some global companies, you will find that branded, location-based keywords are bringing in a lot of searches – and sometimes minimal click-through rates (CTRs), which is where they might lose prospective customers who are evaluating their offers.

This example, together with queries about local currency and customer service, is a clear manifestation of the customers’ desire to evaluate an unfamiliar option, paired with the need to feel connected and to have a safety net. Brands should acknowledge and respond to these needs with clear information, where available.

This is where smaller brands can compete with the giants who might not proactively relate to their audience, either withholding information on global locations or overlooking localization efforts in content and campaigns.

The choice of familiar options over novel ones is a manifestation of our tendency to make decisions based on emotional states.

According to a neuropsychological model called somatic marker hypothesis, advanced by Antonio Damasio, humans heavily rely on some biological markers (or bodily responses) associated with emotional states for decisions, especially when they need to make a quick one.

It is what we call ‘gut feelings,’ like the goosebumps we get for a familiar song or the ‘spidey senses’ that make our siren alarm go off when there is something strange about a situation.

Familiarity has been shown to have its own biological marker, a heightened skin conductance response (SCR), as compared to neutral stimuli. Here is an example from an interesting study on the influence of familiar branding in children’s responses by Smith and colleagues, 2019: When kids saw a snack in a familiar packaging, they showed the same skin conductance response as when they saw family and friends.

These markers, or gut feelings, impact our purchasing behavior, which is why leveraging our customers’ need for relatability can future-proof our brand.

Remember the ‘spidey senses’ I was talking about earlier? When we cannot convey the feeling of familiarity, we risk coming up as imposters, which affects the perception of trustworthiness and the likelihood of commitment in consumers.

A real-world example of this emotional disconnect comes from a neuropsychological disorder called Capgras syndrome, a rare condition where patients with a right hemisphere lesion report that their familiars have been replaced by doubles. This is not linked to their ability to recognize them from physical features, which results unaffected, but the lack of emotional connection they feel when they see them. This is the result of a dissociation between the factual and emotional content of an experience: even when they can recognize their familiars, they still maintain they are imposters — and this is reflected in their skin conductance response: Capgras patients don’t show the biological marker associated with familiarity we have seen in other studies.

The same can be true for brands: if we cannot tap into familiarity and emotions, we might not reach our customers fully. Positive emotions have, in fact, shown a positive impact on perceived brand authority and trustworthiness, as well as purchase intention, in a 2019 WeChat study by the Shanghai University of Engineering Science, whereas negative emotions significantly degraded these components.

And when something about a brand screams ‘danger,’ this can have a cascade effect on all of the good work they put in to reach the customer.

The implications in brand choice are clear: familiarity makes us feel safe enough to commit to an action, as compared to unfamiliar things that might trigger our diffidence.

You know, when you read something that looks kind of legit, like a well-done phishing email, but then there is a typo or a difference in fonts that makes our alarm sirens go off? This is how brand's risk to come across when they do not focus on relating to their customers.

And while familiarity might mean that given two brands, the one that’s most known will most likely win the race, it can be more nuanced than that when they go (or try to go) global since there are many pitfalls in localization that might harm their relationship with customers in other markets.

See this example from this global campaign for Aperol Spritz, which did not seem to convey the Italian conviviality feeling the team was trying to deliver:

Awkward, right?

Another example of a good attempt that went wrong is the localization of the FedEx logo in Arabic, where the arrow has been inverted to match the different reading direction, similar to the color scheme:

As someone who does not speak the language, I thought this was really smart; however, it looks like the design choices made to match the original logo sacrificed the correct grammar, resulting ‘unacceptable’ for some. So, while the logo would result familiar for its branding to a native English speaker, this attempt at localization fails to connect with the actual audience it is trying to target.

To summarize, brands must create consistent experiences across multiple touchpoints to build familiarity. Attention to detail is key: even small mistakes can trigger skepticism in an audience and harm a brand's reputation.

The effects of familiarity could sometimes be attributed to the availability heuristic or the tendency to prefer a brand we see a lot because its frequency makes it more prominent in our minds.

However, leveraging familiarity is more than making sure your brand is omnipresent. While the exposure surely has a significant impact as well, it cannot ensure a transaction when other criteria are not met — in particular, the perceived trust.

So, how can brands leverage familiarity?

Here are high-level steps that brands can take to foster familiarity and build trust with their audience:

• Get to really know the population they are targeting and speak the customers’ language at every point (even when we are talking about subcultures)

• Invest in full localization and make local information about the business prominent and transparent (Google Business Profiles, store or HQ locations, local customer services)

• Leverage personalization to make the customer ‘feel at home’

• Keep branding consistent but with attention to detail to avoid common pitfalls

Wondering how to apply this specifically to your SEO strategy?

Find out in the next article by Myriam Jessier, where she delves into familiarity-led localization and cross-cultural optimization for SEO.