The Illusion of Effort
Show the work behind a product and people rate it higher quality
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- 86%
Behavioural scientists repeatedly find that telling people how much effort went into a product raises their ratings of its quality, beauty and premiumness, even when the effort is logically irrelevant to the result. Ryan Buell showed Skyscanner-style results rated more comprehensive when a progress bar visibly searched each airline. Dyson opens communications with 5,127 prototypes; a vodka brand claimed 143 design iterations and buyers found the identical bottle more beautiful. The flip side is the AI risk: because people experience Claude or ChatGPT spitting out answers in seconds, an AI label reads as low effort and cuts purchase intent sharply. The move is to surface effort deliberately, quantify it, and where automation hides it, relocate the effort story to the human setup behind the system.
Origin
Shotton draws on Ryan Buell's Harvard Business School labour-illusion studies, Kobe Millet's 2023 hand-drawn-versus-AI experiments and Dyson's own prototype-count messaging, collected in his brand-tactics book.
Core principles
- 01The more effort people believe went into something, the higher quality they judge it
- 02Effort is a signal buyers read even when it is logically irrelevant to the output
- 03Hidden work is wasted persuasion; surfaced work is quality perception
- 04When effort is invisible (e.g. AI), you must relocate the effort story
How to run it
- 1
Locate the real effort
Audit the genuine work, iterations, testing or time behind the product that customers never see.
Pro tip Founder autobiographies and R&D logs are goldmines for a quantifiable effort number.
Watch out The effort must be true; inventing it is a reputational risk if exposed.
- 2
Quantify it
Turn the effort into a specific, memorable figure like a prototype or iteration count.
Pro tip '5,127 prototypes' out-persuades 'years of development'.
- 3
Make it visible in the experience
Where possible, let customers see the work happening, such as a search bar naming each supplier it checks.
Pro tip A brief, honest delay that shows work can raise perceived thoroughness.
Watch out Do not fake or pad delays deceptively; lean on real process.
- 4
Lead the copy with effort
Open communications with the effort story rather than only the finished benefit.
- 5
Relocate effort when automation hides it
For AI-built products, shift the story from how fast it was made to the human effort in designing the protocols and system.
Pro tip Talk about the work of setting the AI up, not the seconds it took to run.
Watch out An unqualified 'made by AI' label can slash purchase intent.
In the wild
Across PR, advertising, the website and the very first line of James Dyson's autobiography, the brand repeats that Dyson went through 5,127 prototypes over five years before the bagless vacuum. The number is irrelevant to how well the machine sucks, yet studies show telling people the prototype count sharply raises perceptions of premiumness for the identical product.
→ A durable premium quality perception anchored on visible effort.
Kobe Millet showed people the same poster, sometimes labelled hand-drawn, sometimes labelled created by an AI-powered robot. On artistic merit, creativity and purchase intent the hand-drawn label won every time, with a 61% gap on purchase intent, because people read AI output as effortless.
→ Demonstrated that hiding human effort behind AI can collapse willingness to buy.
Common mistakes
Hiding the craft
Letting the effort stay invisible means customers judge only the output and never pay for the work that went in.
Leading with 'made by AI'
An AI label signals low effort and can cut purchase intent by more than half; the effort narrative must be shifted to the human setup.
Is it for you?
Best for
Premium or craft brands and services where real work goes into the product but customers cannot see it.
Not ideal for
Categories where speed and effortlessness are the core promise and visible effort would read as inefficiency.
From the transcript
“the more effort we think someone else has gone to create a product, the higher quality we think that product will be”
“when it comes to purchase intent, there is a 61% difference”
From the episode
11 Psychology Tricks From the World’s Best Brands - Richard Shotton - #1053
Richard Shotton