The Daily Stat from Harvard Business Review

 

November 17, 2014 To Sell Your Product, Make Three Claims, not Four Study participants reported increasingly favorable impressions of a cereal, a restaurant, a shampoo, an ice cream store, and a politician as researchers raised the number of positive claims about each one, but only up to a point: Beginning with the fourth positive claim, participants' impressions became less favorable, say Suzanne B. Shu of UCLA and Kurt A. Carlson of Georgetown University. This and other experiments demonstrate that when four or more positive claims are made about a product (or a firm or an individual), people infer that the claimant is trying too hard and may have ulterior motives. SOURCE: When Three Charms but Four Alarms: Identifying the Optimal Number of Claims in Persuasion Settings

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