Repetition Is Important

Researchers, communicators & journalists all get this wrong: If you're not repeating yourself, you're not being heard.

Credit: Rebecca/Flickr through CC CY-NC 2.0.

I know probably a dozen scientists who privately confide that they think the idea Earth is in its Sixth Extinction Event possesses a distinct barnyard odor.

So why is the idea we’re in a Sixth Extinction Event now gospel among so many journalists, policymakers and even conservationists?

Because repetition is important.

Years ago I saw the scientist Jon Foley tweeting the same item 10 or 15 times a week. How annoying, I remember thinking. What the hell is he doing?

But MIT Technology Review—an account with more than 1 million followers—was doing the same thing with an annoying tweet about a 1959 essay on creativity by Isaac Asimov, written about in an MIT Tech Review article first published in 2014. The scientist Andrew Maynard looked into it and found, much to his surprise, that MIT Technology Review knew what it was doing. “Aggressively reposting the same tweet over long periods actually works,” wrote Maynard on Medium, “no matter how irritating it is to your followers.”

From Andrew Maynard, “How many times can you post the same tweet—and get away with it?”

You’re not going to offend anybody with repetition, because no one is paying that kind of attention.

Repetition is important.

Last week I found myself wondering whatever had happened to “appealing to science curiosity,” which just a few years back had become the new great hope among science communicators for reducing climate polarization. It had seemed to me such a labored, unlikely route to success.

Then I remembered: Repetition is important.

If there’s one thing researchers, communicators and journalists agree on, it’s this:

Don’t repeat yourself.

Researchers don’t publish the same finding twice. Communicators don’t make the same announcement twice. Journalists don’t break the same story twice.

For each of these professions, getting it out first is all there is. If you missed what they published, they won’t repeat it. They might expand on it later, but they won’t repeat it.

But when working to get something across to actual people — instead of conforming to a guild or cultural norm — repetition is important.

That’s because reality isn’t viral. It’s fungal. Most concepts infiltrate very slowly. Marketing science shows that, unless people are repeatedly exposed to a new concept or product, they won’t even acknowledge it.

And once we’ve acknowledged the new thing, repeating it again and again builds our processing and retrieval fluency around it. We come to believe or prefer it — the truth effect.

So in marketing, we repeat. We say something until we are beyond sick of saying it, until we are convinced that our repetition has become embarrassing.

Only then can we start to be hopeful that other people might have heard it for the first time.

Clarity by itself doesn’t beget understanding. Repetition does.

Most research-driven organizations, steeped as they are in research culture, resist making this shift from clarity to repetition.

Doing so requires a fundamental shift from communications — from the beautiful fantasy of saying something clearly just once and being understood — to marketing, to the long, messy, exhausting campaign mode of repeating and testing messages and insights and ideas until they and you have market penetration.

But if impact is your job, then repetition is your job.

Or, as I heard someone say last week (rather memorably):

“There’s something to be said for having people say, ‘Everywhere I go, I now see what he’s saying. It must be true.’”