I’m Nithya Sudhir. I collect words, chase patterns, and write about whatever makes me curious.
Four essays this year, one throughline. How a brand earns a shopper's attention, guides it once it has it, primes what that shopper trusts before they've read a word, and eventually loses the whole thing by asking for it one too many times.
Attention isn't free. It's a budget. These four essays are about how it gets spent.
🤝 This edition is kindly brought to you by Tatari
By November, every brand is fighting for the same shoppers across Meta, search, email, affiliates, and discounts. That’s when CAC gets expensive.
The brands that outperform during BFCM don’t just capture demand. They create it earlier through channels competitors haven’t tapped, like TV.
PATTERN Beauty shows what that can look like. With Tatari, the brand ran a phased 12-week campaign across streaming and linear to build awareness, drive site traffic, and measure revenue impact from day one, without a massive TV budget.
The results:
58% growth in unique site visitors
3x revenue lift from month one to month three on similar budgets
50% higher brand consideration than social and digital alone
TV didn’t replace PATTERN Beauty’s digital stack. It gave digital more demand to capture before shoppers were in-market.
Every week you wait before BFCM is a week someone in your category is building demand you could have captured first.
Build demand with TV before Q4 gets crowded.
A lesson in attention from a yellow pen.
In the 1960s, Francis J. Honn at Carter's Ink dragged a streak of fluorescent yellow across a page expecting to ruin it. Instead, the words underneath surfaced. That accident became the highlighter, and it works for the same reason Hedwig von Restorff found that the odd item in a list is the one people remember: the brain can't ignore what breaks the pattern. Caraway built an entire cookware brand on that same principle, showing up in sage and cream in a category built on black and steel. It didn't redesign the kitchen. It just refused to disappear into it.
The search bar that drives 45% of the revenue.
A designer at Steve Jobs' post-Apple company NeXT built the magnifying glass icon in 1987 to evoke finding a needle in a haystack. Almost forty years later, 69% of shoppers still go straight for it the moment they land on a site. Gymshark treated theirs as an afterthought until UK customers searching "sweatpants" got zero results, because the same product was called "joggers" in the US. Fixing it took their search conversion rate from 6.2% to over 10% and added an estimated £20 million a year. The search bar isn't a navigation tool. It's the one place a shopper tells a brand exactly what they came for.
💭 Which of these has your brand actually nailed?
26 letters, a million ways to lose a sale.
In 2012, the New York Times ran a quiz asking readers whether they agreed with a claim about asteroids. What readers didn't know was that the same passage was shown in one of six different fonts. People shown it in Baskerville agreed with it more than people shown the exact same words in Comic Sans. That's the Bouba/Kiki effect at work, rounded shapes read soft, sharp shapes read authoritative, and it applies to letterforms before a shopper has consciously registered a single word. Great Jones built its entire visual identity around a swash-heavy vintage serif for exactly this reason. The font decides what kind of brand a shopper thinks they're looking at, in the 13 milliseconds before they read the headline.
Meta found conversions drop 45% by the fourth repeat. Here's what to do instead.
Novelty is what makes a shopper look twice. Repetition is what makes them trust what they're looking at. But Meta's own data shows conversion likelihood falling by roughly 45% by the fourth time someone sees the same creative, the same attention that built trust starts curdling into irritation. Loop Earplugs solved this without ever pulling back on frequency: they kept the product and the promise recognizable but rotated the hook, format and story behind it constantly. The result was a 26% lower cost per acquisition and more than 30% higher return on ad spend than their benchmark. The lesson isn't to show an ad less. It's to notice the moment a specific ad has stopped earning what it used to.
How's the depth of today's edition?
A highlighter, a search bar, a font, an ad played one time too many. None of these are decoration. They're the mechanics of whether a shopper notices a brand at all, and whether they keep noticing it once they have.
As always, hit reply if something in here hits home.
See you next week,
Nithya
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