Organize Collages for New Customers

Do you show a collage of images?

Should it be clean or messy?

It depends:

• New customers prefer organized collages.
• Existing customers prefer messy collages.

Why It Works

In physics, "entropy" is the amount of disorder.

Over time, entropy only increases. Stephen Hawking said:

You may see a cup of tea fall off a table and break into pieces on the floor ... but you will never see the cup gather itself back together and jump back on the table (A Brief History of Time).

This law of entropy has been drilled into your brain: You prefer ads that depict the future in a pristine and untouched condition because your brain is conceptualizing the future with this cleanliness (Biliciler et al., 2022).

How to Apply

• Adapt Collages. Consider an email to subscribers. New subscribers haven’t “touched” your content yet. An organized collage of your content should perform better in the header of a confirmation or welcome email because they are conceptualizing your content in a pristine condition. However, a messy collage should perform better in the header of a regular campaign or remarketing ad after these people have interacted with your content.
• Insert Any Entropy. It's not just collages. An ad for modern kitchen tools converted better with a fully intact egg, whereas an ad for traditional cooking tools converted better with a broken egg:

• Biliciler, G., Raghunathan, R., & Ward, A. F. (2022). Consumers as naive physicists: how visual entropy cues shift temporal focus and influence product evaluations. Journal of Consumer Research, 48(6), 1010-1031.