It’s Wednesday, I’m Nithya Sudhir. I collect words, chase patterns, and write about whatever makes me curious.
Four essays this year, four different starting points. Put them side by side and they're really about one thing.
How little of a purchase decision actually touches the rational part of the brain.
Color decides before a customer reads a word. A shipping bar decides how fast they move through checkout. A checkbox decides that two things placed side by side are easier to judge than one thing alone. An old toy decides someone deserves a little comfort today.
None of it feels like a decision being engineered while it's happening. That's what makes it work.
🤝 This edition is kindly brought to you by Kittl
Behavioral science has known this since the famous jam study: when options multiply, decisions collapse*. A blank AI prompt is that problem at its worst, infinite directions and zero guidance. Kittl's AI Workflows inverts it. Instead of infinite possibilities, you browse a short menu of finished creative directions, each one built and tested by designers and marketers who know what makes people stop and buy. You pick the direction that's already proven, drop your product in, and download. The judgment call is pre-made. The asset is still yours.
AI Workflows are live on Kittl, free to start. Code WORKFLOWS gets you 50% off annual plans, for a limited time.
* Iyengar & Lepper, 2000: shoppers offered 6 jams bought at ~10x the rate of shoppers offered 24
Color is most of it.
Brightland is the example worth sitting with. Aishwarya Iyer put olive oil in white glass bottles when every other brand on the shelf was going dark green and amber. She wasn't picking a prettier color, she was picking a feeling before anyone had touched the product. Color is the first argument a brand makes, and it's finished arguing before the headline even loads.
The Goal Gradient Effect and how the best DTC brands engineer that spike on purpose.
Clark Hull's rats didn't sprint out of the gate. They sprinted at the finish line. Ninety years later, Kitsch's top-tier loyalty customers buy almost nine times more than everyone else, because the brand never lets the finish line drift out of view. A free shipping bar works the same lever every time it shows up on screen. It's a rat in a hallway, dressed up as a UI element.
What a 1927 psychological model can teach ecommerce teams.
Ask someone to rate a wallet from one to ten and you get a shrug. Ask them "this one or that one" and they answer instantly. Louis Thurstone proved that in 1927, long before there was a checkbox labeled Compare anywhere on the internet. Bellroy is the brand worth pointing to on this one, they never ask which product a shopper wants. They ask how it'll sit in your hand, next to the wallet you already own. The comparison isn't Bellroy versus a competitor. It's a shopper versus their own overstuffed pockets.
The neuroscience behind why adults can't stop buying Play-Doh.
Forty-three percent of US adults bought a toy for themselves last year. Not for a kid. For themselves. The essay makes the case that this was never really about the toy. It's about being handed permission to want something uncomplicated during a week that wasn't. Coach figured this out with a plush dinosaur charm. Hasbro figured it out by chasing the adults who once collected G.I. Joe. The trigger isn't the product. It's the memory the product is standing in for.
Read together, these four stop feeling like separate essays. They're the same brain, caught in four different rooms of the store.
As always, hit reply if something in here hits home.
Until next week,
Nithya
How's the depth of today's edition?
P.S. If you want to get a case study about your own brand, reply to this email. If you’d like to reach our newsletter audience (founders, creators, and marketers), click the button below.
If you’re new here, I’m over the moon you’ve joined us! To help me craft content that’s actually useful (and not just noise in your inbox), I’d love it if you took 1 minute to answer this quick survey below. Your insights help shape everything I write.
Insane Media is more than one voice
💡 Dive into our other newsletters - where psychology meets the founders, creator economy, Human resources and AI trends.
