How to soften the truth about your company’s defective products

Blog Neuromarketing mulls the way the brain processes specific numbers and percentages differently, keying off the discussion of “framing” in Jason (not Philip) Zweig’s book Your Money and Your Brain. Zweig’s point is to help regular people understand how the different ways we think about absolute numbers and percentages can lead us astray. Neuromarketing approaches the subject from a, uh, different angle.

There are times when marketing and public relations people do have to address negative topics, as when dealing with press coverage of a company problem. In these cases, I’d recommend percentages. “Only 1% of our laptop power supplies have actually caught on fire” is, from a framing standpoint, better than, “Only 1 out of 100 …” Bad news is bad news, but people will be less likely to visualize their legs getting scorched if they don’t imagine themselves as “the one.”

Great!