How do you convince people to value your creation when they just learned what it is? Innovations are solutions to problems.

Some solutions are wildly original, like the first Google algorithm or iPhone. These solutions violently shoved the industry in a new direction. Wherever Yahoo was going, wherever the Motorola Razor was going, it no longer mattered.

Sometimes those solutions push an industry forward in the direction it was already heading. Every few years, a new gaming console comes out with more power than the last generation. The PS4 becomes the PS5. There are some new features here and there, but the general idea stays the same. This is linear augmentation.

How you market a product depends on which group you fall into. By far, the easiest group to market is the linear augmentation group. It does’t take much work for Sony to explain why you need to upgrade your PS4 into a PS5. Whenever creativity is linear, it becomes very easy for consumers to place value on them.

The brain uses a system called “Anchor and Adjust” to arrive at value judgements. To figure out how much you value a PS5, your brain takes the value of the PS4 (the anchor) and then scales it up or down based on what it knows about the differences between the 2 (the adjustment). This is how your brain takes guesses. It’s how customers figure out what your product means to them. The Anchor & Adjust strategy isn’t simply one tool in your brains toolbox, it’s THE tool.

The more linear this process is, the easier it is for your customers to figure out how much value to assign your idea. When you market your idea, you’re essentially trying to influence this process. You want customers to anchor themselves to high-value ideas and you want them to use adjustment so that they arrive at high value. This is pretty standard when it comes to marketing.

The more revolutionary an idea is, the more difficult it becomes to market it. You can choose between being wildly different, but difficult to market, or you can choose to be marginally different, but easy to market. Said different, the more unique an idea is, the more difficult it becomes for customers to relate to it. This says nothing about the value of the product itself. This deals solely with your customer’s ability to relate to and value your creation.

The Anchor & Adjust strategy is the only tool in your brain for this purpose. But what happens if change isn’t so linear? What happens when Google puts out their first algorithm or the iPhone comes out and revolutionizes the industry? How do we value something wildly new when we have nothing to anchor and nothing to adjust?

The best thing we can do as creatives is to focus on what’s in front of us and get it right. As you’re creating today, think about how you can help your customers interpret your creations. When your customers view your work, what do they anchor to? What metaphor or analogy are they using? How do they go from having little information about who you are and what your product does, to actually valuing it above your competitors?

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