Concept
False Consensus Effect
cognitive-bias self-perception
People overestimate how widely shared their own views, habits, and knowledge are. Richard Shotton applies this to marketing self-sabotage: a marketer who spends 40 hours a week immersed in their own brand's logo, colors, and slogan will notice that brand instantly anywhere it appears, and wrongly assumes ordinary consumers — who spend no comparable attention on it — recognize it just as readily. That false sense of "we're already noticeable" is part of why brands under-invest in genuine Distinctiveness (Von Restorff Effect).
Discussed in
- Episode 5 — 5- The science behind distinctive advertising