Surreal’s banging generation effect Insta post

We're suckers for playful copy that's hiding just how clever it is. And this post from Surreal was the first time we noticed their oh-so-sneaky use of The Generation Effect.

Straight in the swipe file!

Here’s a weird thing your brain does: when you have to complete something yourself — even something small like filling in a blank or solving an easy puzzle — you remember it better.

It’s called the Generation Effect.

In the 70s, Slamecka & Graf found that people have up to 2× better recall for words they had to complete themselves (“H _ R S E → HORSE”) versus complete words they read off of a list.
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In another early experiment on The Generation Effect, people heard an ad jingle that stopped just before the brand name. Compared to the ones that just heard the jingle that included the brand name, the customers who had to do a bit of thinking to finish the phrase could remember their brand 13% better a week later.

Because when our brains have to generate an answer instead of being given one, we process it more deeply. Your brain literally files it away better.

And this is a primo example of the Generation Effect in action by Surreal.

It spells out the new flavour — blueberry muffin — one letter at a time across an Instagram carousel. That’s all it does.

But in our brains, as we slowly piece together the flavour, we’re committing it to memory.

(Helped by the colour cues too, to be fair. Pro tip there.)

And in a constant feed of brands teasing and launching new things and generating hype and making noise, getting people to stop, read the whole carousel and commit it to memory is no small feat.

How to nick this: adding just a touch of friction can make your top of funnel messaging work so much harder.

In fact, the perfect amount of friction is 3 seconds, according to research. More and our brains say "nah, I'm good." Less and it's too easy and we don't bother committing to memory.

So next time you're writing something you want people to remember, ask yourself:

• Can I turn this post or idea into a puzzle we can get our audience involved with?
• Can we make this interactive and playful?
• How can we give them 95% of the information and let their brain do that last 5% of work?

PS. We've written a full deep-dive on this technique with practical tips and examples on our blog.