We don't add, we average

In 1998 a psychologist called Christopher Hsee asked people what they would pay for a set of dinnerware. Some saw a set of 24 pieces, every one perfect. Others saw a set of 40: the same 24, more plates and bowls besides, with a few pieces broken.

The bigger set had everything the smaller one had, and more. People offered less for it.

Put the two side by side and the effect disappears; of course you take the bigger set. But nobody meets a customer story side by side with the better version of itself. They meet it on its own, complete with its broken pieces.

01  Presenters add; readers average

This is not a one-off. In 2012 Kimberlee Weaver, Stephen Garcia and Norbert Schwarz called it the presenter's paradox. They described a hotel with a five-star restaurant, then told a second group about the same hotel with a three-star pool as well. The second group would pay less for it. Most hoteliers asked expected the pool to help.

It works on punishment too. A fine on its own was judged harsher than the same fine plus two hours of community service; the mild extra hours made the whole thing feel milder.

A presenter counts and adds the pieces. A reader takes an impression of the whole, and the whole is closer to an average than a total.

Add something that is merely good to something that is excellent, and you have made it less excellent.

And there is a ceiling even on good news. Suzanne Shu and Kurt Carlson found that when people know someone is trying to persuade them, three positive points make the best impression. The fourth sets off the alarm.

Nobody has ever mistaken a customer story for anything other than persuasion.

02  Eleven proof points and a three-star pool

I have read a great many customer stories in the last twenty-five years, and spent a good part of them caught between the demand for hard numbers and customers who may or may not have any.

The trouble with stories made by committee is that everyone wants their pound of flesh: product marketing, the brand team, regional marketing, solution marketing, PR. Every request is reasonable in itself and every addition may well be true; yet the story often ends up weaker than the first draft.

Nobody set out to write that story.

We have all lived this. The hardest conversation in the job is telling a colleague or client that their perfectly good number or sentence is making the story worse.

The three-star pool is not wasted, though. Cut from the flagship, it may be the best thing on the page in a short story for a different buyer with a different job title.

03  The reader that goes first

There is now a second reason to keep proof points to three, and it has nothing to do with psychology.

Last issue I quoted G2: half of B2B software buyers now start their research with an AI chatbot more often than with Google. They describe their situation and ask who has done it before.

Gartner predicted this in early 2024, forecasting that traditional search volume would fall by a quarter by 2026. And when an answer appears above the traditional links, people stop clicking.

Pew tracked the browsing of 900 American adults and found they clicked through to a result on 8% of visits when Google showed an AI summary, against 15% when it did not. Links inside the summary itself were clicked on 1% of visits.

Put those together and your next buyer may never land on your customer story. They will read what an assistant made of it: a sentence or two, probably set beside two competitors.

Humans average proof points; the assistant does something worse. It picks. Give it one strong result and it has nothing else to pick. Give it eleven, and you no longer decide which one represents your customer to the buyer.

04  Where stories go to hide

The reader that goes first has blind spots.

The PDF behind a form. Rarer than it was, but still out there. The lead-gen gate made sense when the story was the bait. An assistant does not fill in forms, so as far as it is concerned the story does not exist.

Video with nothing written down. I spent twenty years persuading clients that video matters; it is often the most compelling thing in the library. But a film with no transcript and no written summary is a closed box to the reader that goes first. Give it words and it gets found, and then somebody presses play.

05  Three things to try

Take your strongest customer story and count its proof points. If there are more than three, cut to three, and find a home for the rest in other stories or formats.

Ask an AI assistant the questions you suspect your prospects ask, in their words, and see which of your proof points, if any, come back.

Find your best customer video and, if it does not have one already, give it a page of plain text that an assistant can read.

06  What comes next

This is the ninth issue of Proof Positive.

Next issue: the nine-week queue. The draft is done on day two and the story publishes in week nine, and almost nobody in between is being unreasonable. Red tape is real, yet so is urgency; I think most of the delay can be fixed.

Subscribe if you have not. Forward to one person whose latest customer story has eleven numbers in the stat box and the same eleven again in the body copy.

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Robin Hamilton is the founder of Proofpoints, the customer storytelling platform. Previously, cofounder and CEO of inevidence. Proof Positive is published fortnightly.

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