The Devil's Advocate

58

Make your literature illegible

You’ve come up with a compelling offer for your customers. Surely you want to communicate it so clearly that your customers will understand it with the minimum of effort?

Surprisingly, it works the other way. In the same way that obvious adverts sail right past us (see Rule 48: Stop making sense), literature that’s too easy to read does just the same.

To test the hypothesis, researchers at Princeton University asked two groups of volunteers to read the same piece of text. One version was clear and easy to read, but with the second group, they deliberately shrunk the text size and put it in an annoyingly hard-to-read Comic Sans font. When tested later, the group with the hard text remembered 14 per cent more ...