Casey: (sniffing cup) Hmm, smells…healthy.

Taylor: Says “Fresh & Smooth Beet Blend.” Bottoms up.

They all drink. Casey’s eyes go wide.

Casey: WHY is this attacking my tongue?!

Taylor: (eyes watering) Holy…there’s ghost pepper in this!

Casey: Ghost pepper? It’s called “Fresh & Smooth!”

Taylor: (wiping tears from his eyes) Guess it’s “fresh” because you can’t feel your face.

Casey: And smooth because it burns all your taste buds off.

Taylor: Well, it definitely stands out.

Casey: Yeah. Like a fire drill during meditation.

—-

Turns out, the fastest way to kill curiosity is to confuse people’s brains.

And sometimes, you don’t even notice you’re doing it, until someone’s eyes are watering and they’re quietly plotting revenge on your sample table.

Which brings us to a quick game. Read these words out loud:

BLUE 

GREEN 

RED 

Feel that little brain stutter? That moment when your inner voice went “wait, what?”

That little mental hiccup is the Stroop Effect in action. And it’s been quietly messing with your marketing materials since you first opened PowerPoint.

It’s the same mental friction your prospects run into every time they see your brand, and you might not even realize it’s happening.

And no, it’s not the kind of memorable experience you’re aiming for.

What Is the Stroop Effect (And Why Your Marketing Team Should Care)

The Stroop Effect is one of those elegant, quietly brilliant psychological phenomena that designers should probably be taught alongside color theory and typography. 

Let me take you back to 1935. Psychologist John Ridley Stroop likely had a slow day and thought, “Hey, what would happen if I make people’s brains work overtime?” 

So he gathered volunteers and let them play the same game you played at the start. He showed them words like “Red” printed in blue ink or “Green” but in yellow letters, then grilled them to name the color of the text and not read the word out loud. 

People’s brains had a meltdown.

The volunteers stumbled, paused, and looked genuinely confused, trying to process two conflicting pieces of information at once. It was like watching someone try to pat their head and rub their stomach while reciting the alphabet backward.

The word said one thing, the color said another, and the result was cognitive friction that slowed the brain’s processing power. 

In a lab, this delay is milliseconds. But in marketing and design, it’s more consequential because it represents the moment a potential customer pauses, gets confused, or has to work harder than they want to.

Here’s where it gets more interesting. This effect doesn’t just apply to words and colors. It’s also at play when your visual design language (we’re talking color, shape, form, and typography) sends a message that contradicts your intended meaning. 

The Hidden Cognitive Tax Your Brand Is Charging

When you ask people to spend extra mental energy just to process your materials, it’s like charging a cover fee to hear your pitch. Most people will pass.

Consider how most brands choose colors:

• They look good together
• Match the “vibe”
• Follow design trends

But colors aren’t decoration, they’re communication. They carry meaning, trigger associations, and influence behavior in ways that go deeper than aesthetic preference.

When your color choices fight against your message, you create brand friction. Your audience works harder to understand what you’re saying, and that extra effort costs you engagement, conversions, and memorability.

A financial services company using bright orange (that screams risk and caution) to promote “stability and security” undermines its message. Wellness brands using sharp, aggressive reds to discuss calm and balance work against themselves.

The problem isn’t that these colors are wrong; it’s that they’re having a conversation your audience doesn’t want to navigate.

Where This Shows Up in Your Marketing (And You Probably Don’t Even Know It)

The Classic Button Catastrophe

We’ve all seen it: Submit and Cancel buttons that could be clones. Same size, same color, same everything, basically a pop quiz nobody studied for.

Inside your user’s head, the inner monologue kicks in:

• Which one submits?
• And which of these wipes everything out?
• Why do they look identical?
• Is this some weird UX riddle?

By the time they figure it out, they might have already rage‑clicked Cancel. Or worse, they’ve gone off to your competitor’s site, where the buttons make sense at a glance.

Color‑Shape Psychology Gone Wrong

This is where it gets sneakier and more interesting. Our brains come hardwired with color‑shape shorthand:

• Red + sharp angles → urgent, stop, caution
  
• Blue + soft curves → calm, secure, trustworthy
  
• Green + flowing lines → natural, balanced, growth‑oriented
  
• Yellow + energetic shapes → cheerful, attention‑grabbing

So when your brand fights these deep‑rooted associations, like using an angry red circle to sell a meditation app, or spiky geometric shapes to brand your warm, approachable non‑profit, you create cognitive dissonance.

It technically works, but it feels off. Like showing up to a beach picnic in a tuxedo. Yes, everyone notices, and no one can quite relax.

The Template Tornado

And then there’s the classic marketing department trap of switching up slide decks, one‑pagers, and campaign graphics every few months, just to keep it “fresh.”

It sounds creative, but it quietly forces your audience to do detective work, asking themselves, “Wait, is this the same brand as last time?”

Instead of making your brand instantly recognizable by creating properly branded templates, you’re burning mental energy on brand confirmation. Which, spoiler, is energy they won’t spend on your actual message.

The Real Cost of Making People Think Too Hard

When someone lands on your website, opens your pitch deck, or flips through your brochure, they’re not settling in with a latte to savor your design decisions. They’re skimming, scanning, and making snap judgments about whether you’re worth more of their time or whether to click away.

Every tiny moment of cognitive friction is a chance for them to bounce. And often, they do.

How to Use Color‑Shape Psychology to Your Advantage

Instead of fighting how the brain naturally reads and reacts, smart brands lean in. They use these baked‑in color‑shape associations to steer perception, without making people consciously notice the steering.

Match Your Colors to Your Message

If your message is trust, calm, and reliability:

• Reach for blues and greens
  
• Pair with rounded, flowing shapes
  
• Think circles, gentle curves, organic lines

If your message is energy, urgency, action:

• Lean into reds and oranges
  
• Add angular, dynamic shapes
  
• Think triangles, arrows, sharp lines

If you want to feel premium, sophisticated, high‑end:

• Deep purples, blacks, metallics
  
• Simple, minimal shapes
  
• Think rectangles, thin lines, generous white space

Create a Consistent Visual Language

Your brand should feel like a single conversation, not a new dialect every time someone sees it.

That means:

• Your colors always reinforce the same emotional tone
  
• The shape choices echo that same tone
  
• And, your layouts stay familiar across touchpoints

The goal? When people see something from you, their brain immediately says, “Yep, that’s them.” No detective work required.

Test the Cognitive Load

Here’s a quick gut‑check. Grab someone who’s never seen your brand materials before. Show them your homepage, your main pitch deck, or your sales sheet.

Then ask: “In three seconds, what do you think you’re supposed to do next?”

If they pause, guess, or say “uhhh…”, congratulations, you’ve discovered cognitive friction you can clean up. 

Sometimes, though, cognitive friction isn’t a problem to fix, but something you can use to your advantage. 

When to Embrace the Friction (Yes, Really)

The Stroop Effect isn’t always the villain twirling its mustache. Occasionally, a pinch of cognitive dissonance is exactly what you need to break through the noise.

Use It to Stop the Scroll

Let’s say someone’s blazing through LinkedIn at warp speed, thumbs a blur, until, suddenly, your post makes them freeze. Why? Because you threw in something their brain didn’t expect – an offbeat color palette, a headline that contradicts the image, or copy that makes them do a double take.

That moment of “wait, what?” is gold. It snaps people out of autopilot and into paying actual attention.

But Know When to Back Off

Use friction to get noticed, then shift gears. Once you’ve caught their eye, switch to cognitive fluency so they know exactly what to do next.

The short recipe: Confuse to captivate. Clarify to convert.

But, and this is important, make a hard pass on creating friction in these areas:

• Navigation menus
  
• Call-to-action buttons
  
• Form fields
  
• Anywhere someone needs to get something done fast

For these sections, clarity is non-negotiable. 

Making This Work (Without Adding to Your Workload)

Already juggling strategy, creative, and about a dozen Slack pings? Good news, you don’t need to burn it all down or launch a six‑month rebrand to start applying these changes to your brand.

1. Audit What You’ve Got

Pull up your key marketing pieces, like website, pitch deck, lead gen forms, and look at them like you’ve never seen them before:

• Are your colors quietly arguing with your message?
  
• Do your buttons make it instantly clear what moves someone forward and what cancels everything?
  
• Are your templates helping brains glide or making them trip?

2. Create a Clear Visual Hierarchy

Primary vs. secondary actions should never feel like a trick question:

• Forward‑moving actions → place them to the right, use colors that feel like “go”
  
• Destructive or stop actions → make them look different, with colors that say “stop”
  
• Secondary options → tone them down with more neutral styling so they never compete for attention

Think of it as training your users’ eyes on where to go, so they never have to ask.

3. Build Smarter Templates 

When you’re designing new templates or updating old ones, ask:

• Does each slide or section flow logically from the last?
  
• Are my color choices supportive of my story instead of contradicting it?
  
• Do my shape choices echo the brand personality I want people to feel?

A little upfront thinking means fewer moments of “what?” and a brand that feels unmistakably yours every time you hit export.

Wrapping Up

Your audience’s brains are busy.

They’re scanning, skimming, and deciding in a blink what’s worth their attention and what isn’t. Even small moments of cognitive friction can quietly push them away from your message before it ever lands.

The answer isn’t to water everything down or play it safe. It’s to understand how color, shape, and hierarchy steer the brain and then design with that in mind.

Sometimes, that means using a touch of cognitive dissonance to stop the scroll. More often, it means building visual clarity that clears the path for your story to come through.

Because the best marketing doesn’t make people work to get it. It makes the right message feel effortless to take in.

—

If your materials look polished but still feel like they’re fighting you, let’s chat.

Nicole Steffen Design helps teams create visual systems that work with how people think, so your strategy isn’t lost in translation.