Why It Works: What can marketers learn from The Gruffalo?

A mouse took a stroll through the deep, dark wood. A fox saw the mouse, and the mouse looked good. ‘Where are you going, little brown mouse? Come and have tea in my underground house.’

Familiar lines to anyone who has known any small child since 1999.

What is it that makes The Gruffalo – and in fact many children’s books – so very sticky? Perhaps unsurprisingly, it’s because they align with many well-researched biases. And those same biases can be used to make commercial communications more memorable.

You might argue that these tactics only work on kids. But in truth, getting something to stick in an adult’s mind is the real challenge. Toddlers will happily settle in for a bedtime story and give you their undivided attention; consumers, on the other hand, are a distracted, only half-listening group, with a thousand other things competing for attention.

Which is exactly why marketers need these techniques. When the audience is drifting, ads have to work twice as hard to stick.

Paint a picture in your head

So, what is it that The Gruffalo does so well?

First up, is the word choice. As Michael Burke from University College Roosevelt, in the Netherlands, points out in his 2022 paper, in the journal Language and Literature:

“The story is also laden with concrete nouns, from mouse and fox and snake, to house and rocks and lake, and from eyes and teeth and toes, to wart, knees and nose. Abstract nouns are thin on the ground.”

What does he mean by abstract and concrete words? A concrete word is a physical thing that you can easily visualise; whereas an abstract word is a concept that is harder to visualise.

Why It Works: How Stoptober helps millions to quit smokingAs a communicator you should be prioritising concrete words as it’s far easier to recall words that we can visualise. The original evidence stretches back to 1972 and the work of Ian Begg at the University of Western Ontario. He read lists of words to participants and found that, when quizzed later, they recalled four times as many concrete words as abstract ones.

In 2021, when researching my book, The Illusion of Choice, Mike Treharne and I decided to rerun Begg’s study. We recruited 425 participants and gave them a list of ten two-word phrases, some abstract and some concrete.

You can see the words we used below:

After five minutes, we asked participants to freely recall as many phrases as they could. And we found they remembered almost ten times more concrete phrases than abstract ones (6.7% vs 0.7%). Even more significant than the original study.

Begg suggests that concrete phrases are more memorable than abstract phrases because vision is the most powerful of our senses.

This advice to use concrete language might sound simple. A statement of the obvious even. But think about your brand. Are you using abstract claims, such as being trustworthy, premium, or value for money? If so, there’s an opportunity.

The best brands don’t fall into that trap. Think of Red Bull. They don’t say, “Red Bull gives you energy.” That would be abstract. They say, “Red Bull gives you wings.” And since you can picture wings, it’s far more memorable.

Words that click make things stick

The second thing Donaldson applies to good effect is rhyme. This isn’t an incidental feature, it’s something she knew was key. The Gruffalo is based on a Chinese folk tale. But in that original telling the animals featured were a tiger and a mouse.

Donaldson struggled to rhyme anything with tiger, so she changed the villain to a Gruffalo. That enabled her to have a rhyming chorus:

Silly old [fox, owl, snake]! Doesn’t he know, / There’s no such thing as a Gruffalo.

A variant of that chorus appears six times (and the book is only 700 words long).

Rhymes help children memorise the lines, so they know exactly what’s coming next, which feeds excitement and anticipation. Any parent knows that children ask for the same story again and again – this sense of mastery is why.

But it’s not just kids. There’s convincing evidence that rhyme boosts memorability among adults too. In 2024, as part of the research for my new book, Hacking the Human Mind, my co-author, MichaelAaron Flicker and I ran a study to test the phenomenon along with Jon Puleston and Nicki Morley at Kantar.

Why It Works: How McDonald’s applies behavioural science to sell friesWe showed 401 participants a list of ten statements, half of which rhymed, and half of which didn’t. For example, one rhyming phrase was, “woes unite foes”, whereas the non-rhyming phrase was, “woes unite enemies”. Respondents were later asked to list as many of the phrases as they could remember.

The results were conclusive. Participants were more than three and a half times as likely to recall a rhyming phrase than a non-rhyming one.

So rhyme works for adults as well as kids. And if you want your audience to remember your brand, you could do a lot worse than using a rhyming slogan or headline.

It’s a tactic that’s gone out of fashion, but is behind some memorable campaigns that ran decades back yet we can still quote today e.g. ‘Beanz Meanz Heinz’ and Pringles’ ‘Once You Pop You Can’t Stop’.

Say it, say it again… and say it once more

Again common in kids books, The Gruffalo makes generous use of repetition. For children, this helps boost processing, consolidate understanding and build familiarity.

These are important goals for brands too, yet marketers seem inclined to value novelty over consistency. I think this is a mistake – your audiences derive comfort from consistency in ads just as children do from their stories. Why does repetition work so well?

Evidence shows that we tend to develop a fondness for the familiar. In a 1968 study by Stanford psychologist Robert Zajonc, researchers tested the effects of mere exposure on attitude.

Why It Works: Creme Eggs and why we want what we can’t haveParticipants saw images of nonsense words, Chinese characters or faces, and were asked to rate how pleasant the images were. In some cases, they’d seen the image before (between 2 and 25 times) and sometimes they had not.

The findings were definitive: the more times people had been exposed to an image, the more they liked it. This is a factor at play in The Gruffalo: the characters, the phrasing, and the plot all become increasingly familiar as we read through the book. We naturally develop a fondness for it. Couple this with night-after-night repetition, and you can see why children and adults alike love it so.

So, brands take note. Don’t be too quick to replace your well-known, well-loved campaigns. Part of their strength is their very familiarity.

Marketers can clearly learn a lot from bedtime reading. The stories we fall in love with as children aren’t just charming, they’re strategically brilliant: rhymes, repetition and visualisable language – these all make for a magic, and memorable, mix.