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Imagine this…
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You’ve just finished writing your sales page after three days of tweaking every paragraph.
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Because you love reading about features, you crammed it with bullet points covering your 12-module curriculum, weekly 90-minute calls, and a detailed breakdown of your proprietary goal-setting framework.
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You’ve also included a comparison table showing how your program stacks up against other coaching memberships.
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Every logical argument is there, and joining feels like a complete no-brainer.
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Re-reading it at 11 a.m. after downing your third cup of coffee, you can’t help but feel proud.
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This is the *exact* type of sales page that would have you opening your wallet ASAP.
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You’re confident potential members will not only appreciate but devour the detailed features like you do.
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​But when launch day arrives, your analytics tell a brutal story:​
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73% bounce rate. Average time on page: 18 seconds. Zero enrollments.

Stunned, you refresh your analytics page, assuming it’s gotta be wrong.
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But it’s not—the same abysmal numbers are glaring back at you.
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​Why did the sales page you were certain everyone would love completely flop?
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​In today’s edition of Why We Buy 🧠 we’ll explore the False Consensus Effect—why we assume others think, feel, and act the way we do.
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Let’s get into it.

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🧠 The Psychology of the False Consensus Effect

Stanford psychologist Lee Ross and his colleagues exposed a huge flaw in human reasoning: we overestimate how much others share our beliefs, preferences, and decisions.
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They asked college students whether they’d walk around campus wearing a sandwich board sign reading “Eat at Joe’s.”
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​Students who agreed to wear the sign estimated that 65% of their peers would also agree to do so.
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But students who refused? They estimated only 31% would participate.
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Turns out, we use ourselves as the measuring stick for “normal,” assuming our perspective represents the majority.

And this bias doesn’t just affect college students with sandwich boards.
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As marketers, if we assume our own preferences represent what “most customers” want, it can negatively shape our business decisions, from building products to writing copy.
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That’s why, to avoid expensive miscalculations (and loads of regret), we’ve gotta listen to what our customers *actually* want.

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🤑 How To Apply This

Alright, so how can you apply this right now to sell more?
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Subscriptions​
Let real users confirm or reject your strategy

For decades, TV shows followed the same formula: one new episode a week.
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But when Netflix released House of Cards in 2013, they broke from tradition, dropping all 13 episodes at once.
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This gave users a choice: binge-watch immediately or pace yourself however you wanted.

The result? Many viewers watched an average of six episodes in the first few weeks of release. This validated Netflix’s strategy and helped establish the full-release model they still use today.
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(Btw, more than half a million people watched season 2 of House of Cards in one weekend. 🤯) 

E-commerce​
Test everything, assume nothing

Amazon is built on a “culture of metrics” where “data trumps intuition.”

So instead of executives arguing about what they want—and, consequently, what they believe customers want—Amazon runs A/B tests on everything—from product recommendations to homepage layout.

Their recommendation engine alone, powered by customer behavior data, drives ~35% of all purchases.

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Ads​
Find your actual ​best-fit buyers and market accordingly

Most people assume that men buy men’s body wash.
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But research revealed otherwise: women made 60% of all body wash purchases for men. So Old Spice flipped their approach, launching the “Smell Like A Man, Man” campaign.
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This included “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” ad.

Instead of targeting men, they targeted females with humorous, aspirational messaging that suggested what their men could be if they smelled like the Old Spice model.
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The campaign went viral and within a few months, it had doubled sales from the previous year.

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💥 The Short of It

Your biggest marketing blind spot is assuming your customers think and act like you do.
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The False Consensus Effect tricks you into believing your beliefs, behaviors, and preferences represent the majority. But customers often want completely different things than what you’d choose.
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That’s why uncovering what really makes them click, tick, and buy is essential to crafting marketing that lands.
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​​Until next time, happy selling!