Secret behind succesful marketing

Powerful, Persuasive, Potent, Rule of 3

For millennia, the number three has been imbued with a mystique, a power that has seen it placed at the centre of rules governing effective communication within all aspects of culture. Fundamentally, human beings are programmed to process information through instinctive pattern recognition. 

The Rule of Three makes information memorable because three entities combine brevity with rhythm, have the smallest amount of information to create a pattern and consequently simplest to recall.

The most common uses of the Rule of Three relate to marketing theory, slogan creation and speech writing.

Marketing theory 
Quoting E. St. Elmo Lewis
“The mission of an advertisement is to

• attract a reader, to look at the advertisement and start to read it

• interest him, to continue to read it

• convince him, so that he will believe it.”

This formed the widely-used “Attention – Interest -Desire – Action” (AIDA) marketing model. A system of steps with which to engage an audience­ effectively. This has since been distilled to the “Cognition, Affect, Behaviour” (CAB) model;

• Cognition (Awareness or learning)

• Affect (Feeling, interest or desire)

• Behavior (Action)

Slogan creation
Unsurprisingly, the Rule of Three has been used to create some of the most powerful advertising slogans of the twentieth century. With three simple words, an entire brand is instantly recalled

• Just do it

• Beanz Meanz Heinz

• I’m lovin’ it

• Finger lickin’ good

Memorable Speech Writing Examples
“Friends, Romans, Countrymen” William Shakespeare
“Blood, sweat and tears” General Patton
“Our priorities are ‘Education, Education, Education’” Tony Blair
“Government of the people, by the people, for the people” Gettysburg Address
“There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics” Benjamin Disraeli

So if you want

• to engage with people

• to persuade people

• your ideas to stick in their head

then think in threes!