4 Cognitive Biases Affecting Your PR Plan
Reading Time: ~3 Mins | Written By : Sydney Vardja
When PR professionals create plans, there are many steps to ensure effectiveness. Some steps include defining a target audience, using available market intelligence, and figuring out how to get an edge on the competition. But there’s one aspect we often overlook: the cognitive biases that actively affect the decisions we make.
Whether we notice them or not, there are an abundance of cognitive biases that affect how we promote a brand. We’ve rounded up 5 of the most prominent cognitive biases that you’ll definitely want to keep in mind when you craft your 2023 PR plan.
1. Overconfidence Bias
Overconfidence bias is a well-established bias in which a person's subjective confidence in their judgments is greater than the objective accuracy of those judgments. Let’s give an example of how this applies in the PR world. Your client is a neurologist who has been practicing for decades. A new pandemic just emerged: they’re calling it COVID-19. Upon its transmission, doctors everywhere are commenting on whether the virus affects the human brain.
Your client wants to weigh in to establish industry credibility. Her cognitive bias is pushing her to believe that the virus doesn’t affect the brain—she heard it’s respiratory. But from a PR perspective, it’s all too new to tell! Rather than rushing to the media to provide her opinion, she waits for more information before commenting. Later studies show COVID-19 does affect the brain.
True leaders acknowledge that they might be wrong. From a PR perspective, you never want to jump the gun when it comes to providing expert opinion.
2. Ego-centric Bias
Ego-centric bias means we tend to overweight our point of view over the point of others. A great example of this is using data in PR. There’s nothing like some undeniable metrics that prove that a company is crushing it. The issue here is that by leaning into ego-centric bias, we neglect to consider conflicting data that weakens our opinion.
Any brand that does customer surveys will want to consider ego-centric bias when they share data they’ve collected. When existing shoppers fill out information that supports the business, this isn’t accounting for the conflicting point of views of those who did not take the survey.
Reject ego-centric bias in your PR plan by making the effort to get diverse metrics to support your claim.
3. Bandwagon Effect
The bandwagon effect is basic group thinking or the tendency to do things many other people do—especially those who relate to you. If you’re creating a PR plan for your cosmetics brand, it’s human nature—but also business strategy— to check out what your competitors are doing. Where issues arise is when your brand gets “stuck.” When your brand looks identical to its competitors, whether it’s packaging, social media strategy, or influencer marketing, your brand will get lost in an oversaturated industry.
To reject the bandwagon effect, you’ll want to think about this phenomenon for your media tactics. As important as it is to stay up-to-date on what other brands are doing, you must also allocate money and resources to diverse tactics that separate your brand from competition. Don’t get sucked into the bandwagon effect!
4. Curse of Knowledge
The curse of knowledge is a cognitive bias that results in brands talking about themselves in ways that the average consumer will not understand. You know your product or service like the back of your hand. The lingo is second nature to you. You could recite your company’s mission statement in your sleep.
And though this may seem like a good thing, this is where you lose customers’ interest. No one wants to feel stupid when bombarded with unnecessarily long, complex terminology. One of the biggest struggles in developing an effective PR plan is speaking to your audience in their own language! Remember this when crafting yours.
Cognitive biases can be hard to recognize, but understanding how they play into the decisions we make is extremely important. To be successful in PR, it’s important that you consistently work to reject cognitive biases. Real success will come when your PR plan is built upon transparency!
