Researchers had been running this experiment for fifty years: show someone a number, then ask them to guess a different one, and watch the guess drift toward the number they just saw.
A meta-analysis pulled 482 of those studies together. The drift held at an effect size of 0.825 on a scale where anything past 0.8 counts as a large effect — the kind of gap you'd notice without needing a chart. It barely moved even after they tried to argue it away as a fluke of unpublished results.
That's what happens to a guess.
Nobody has run the same test on a whole first impression, on four homepages instead of four digits. Which is exactly why your four open tabs (your research on a specific tool/solution that you are looking to buy) are worth a second look. Play the memory back slower, and watch what actually happened.
Tab one loaded first. What you have seen in that tab it had already set the bar for what the tool looks like.
Tab two got measured against tab one.
So did tab three.
By tab four, you weren't reading a homepage anymore. You were reading a deviation, and you called the deviation cheap.
You can't see this happening to your own visitors, and neither can they. They think they're comparing your company to the other one. They're comparing your tab to the last tab. Your analytics can't show you what loaded seconds before yours, in a browser you'll never touch.
Which makes "look better" the wrong goal.
Okay, so what is it you might ask. My advise: don't compare yourself to your competiror. Instead make your page too specific to fit inside anyone else's template: your own words, a claim nobody else could have written, so specific that no visitor can finish it with "this is like the other one, but..."
I'm sure you hate the ",but..." turn like I do.
You want to be unique. Everybody does.
So don't wait. Just fuckin' make it happen.
To see how a prospect sees you, try this: Open your website as fourth or fifth, behind three competitors, and read it from that seat.
Featured image: "TV Buddha" (1974), Nam June Paik
