What I’d like to do is pose a hypothesis on Monday, debate Tuesday through Thursday, and then draw a conclusion on Friday. But because I decided to start this blog on a Wednesday (of all days), we’ll have to make this round of scientific inquiry a bit shorter. Them’s the breaks.

Hypothesis: Prolonged Boldness is More Effective

Conclusion: FALSE.

We ran into a bit of conundrum when we introduced the idea of “scaling” boldness. Did we mean prolonging the exposure to bold messages, or increasing the level of boldness? In the former case, we saw how being bold over an extended period of time is actually detrimental to the continued effectiveness of the message — and in at least one case how it can turn your audience against you. This is certainly not true of less-bold messages which, while they may not inspire positive response, certainly do not inspire overly negative response.

Hypothesis: The Bolder the Message, the More Effective.

Conclusion: None.

We can agree that bold messages have the potential to be more effective than less bold messages, but it is unclear whether a bold message is clearly and consistently more effective than a milder one. What’s more, it is difficult to rank the relative boldness of messages — we can identify messages that are clearly bold and those that clearly are not (with a few exceptions, naturally), but as of this moment we are unable to define either A) how to classify the boldness of a message, or B) what traits comprise a bold message. Until we can agree on a standard of measurement, we cannot test our hypothesis.

Recommendation: If You Wish to Be Bold, Do It in Small Doses

There is ample evidence to support the idea that boldness works once. We see it every day — the hard sell at a used car lot, the busty women on TV selling domain names, the headlines on tabloid magazines. They’ll get you once. But anyone who has bought a used car from a pushy salesman once will tell you that they’ll never do it again. Consumers get wise to boldness quickly, so if you’re going to use it, proceed with caution. It can work — I had a positive reaction to the Target ad to the extent that I blogged about it two days ago, and that pushy beggar got me to throw him a buck, after all — but at a certain point boldness just becomes unwelcome noise.

Assignment: Be Bold.

I want you to think up something bold to say about your product, service or company. Get wild. Be outrageous. Provoke someone into action (or stun them into disbelief — that’s almost as good). Then when you think of it, post it in the comments section below. Then read some of the bold messages that others have created and discuss ways they might implement them. But above all, have fun!