Choice overload is partly why users choose familiar options, which is why leveraging familiarity can be a superpower to make your brand stand out in a sea of similar options.
2. It regulates the way we perceive experiences
Familiarity bias is not just a resource optimization process, but a real tool that has been shown to shape attention, memory, brand preferences, donation behavior, and even perceived taste when it comes to food.
Let’s take an example that works for me: As an Italian, my childhood afternoon snack was Nutella on bread, so whenever I see another chocolate spread, I don’t even think about it, as everything seems to taste weird. my; However, my Spanish friend Isabel grew up with Nocilla and swears by it, saying Nutella tastes bad in comparison.
But why does this happen? It’s because familiarity can even shape how we perceptually experience something, creating biased preference behavior, as shown by Wageningen University & Research in the Netherlands. The research team examined brand recognition and taste preference in soy sauce and concluded that if the brand of the sauce was known and familiar, it was reported to be liked more. This taste preference held true even when participants thought they recognized the well-known brand but it was wrong. Recognition, either correct or incorrect, of their own brand name significantly increased liking scores.
While theories of decision-making and emotion are more complex and still under investigation, the power of familiarity on brand perception and preference has been demonstrated by many other studies in recent decades (Monroe, 1976; Park & Lessig, 1981; Maria Sääksjärvi , Saeed Samiee, 2007; Ma, Wang & Da, 2021 to name but a few). For example, a landmark study by McClure and colleagues investigated behavioral attitudes toward well-known brands by exposing participants to a blind taste test of Pepsi vs. Coca-Cola. When participants did not know the brand of drink they were tasting, preference for one or the other was equally distributed across the group. However, when the drinks were labeled, ‘Brand knowledge of one of the drinks had a dramatic effect on expressed behavioral preferences and measured brain responses.” In short, both brand knowledge and culture influence emotion-based preference.
3. It makes us feel safe
As we’ve seen, the familiarity bias allows us to limit choices and free up cognitive resources to devote to other important tasks, but what makes it so powerful in behavioral and economic decisions is something deeper—the perception of safety that can conveys.
While undoubtedly a resource-efficient mechanism, familiarity also shapes how we feel about brands, especially the perceived trust we can place in them. And it is precisely the perception of security that can turn a casual visitor into a loyal customer.
The familiarity heuristic is well known in behavioral finance, with investors choosing local or domestic companies as they associate it with less risk. The same seems to be the case with online businesses. If you dig into the Google Search Console (GSC) queries of some global companies, you’ll find that branded location-based keywords bring in a lot of searches – and sometimes low click-through rates (CTRs), where they may lose prospects customers evaluating their offers.
