Are You Leveraging the Power of Verbs in Your Marketing?

By Stephen Palmer - May 31 , 2011

In 1974, psychologists Elizabeth Loftus and John Palmer showed test subjects seven 5-30 second video clips of car accidents. Every subject saw the same clips.

After viewing the videos, the subjects were given questions about the accidents and were asked to write down their answers.

The twist was that they were given different questions.

The critical questions were:

1. About how fast were the cars going when they hit each other?
2. About how fast were the cars going when they smashed each other?
3. About how fast were the cars going when they collided with each other?
4. About how fast were the cars going when they bumped into each other?
5. About how fast were the cars going when they contacted with each other?

The time taken to conduct the experiment was about one and a half hour.

The results? The highest speed estimates — 40.8 miles per hour on average — were provided by those asked how fast the cars were going when they smashed into each other.

The lowest speed estimates — 31.8 miles per hour on average — were provided by those asked how fast the cars were going when they contacted each other.

A slight change in verbs resulted in a 22.1% difference in recall.

Table: Speed Estimates From Various Verbs

Are you connecting the dots that this has profound and far-reaching implications for advertising and marketing?

Are you leveraging the power of verbs in your marketing messages?

Stephen Palmer is a marketing consultant and writer with KGaps Consulting. His firm uses their methodology Hub Mentality to help small businesses generate more leads, sales, and referrals while making their marketing budget more efficient.

Stephen is the co-author of as Hub Mentality: Shifting from Business Transactions to Community Interactions as well as the co-author of the New York Times bestseller Killing Sacred Cows: Overcoming the Financial Myths that are Destroying Your Prosperity.