The term “self-reference effect” started to be used in the 70s and early 80s. Psychologist Roger Schank and his team conducted experiments that showed that people tend to remember information better when they relate it to themselves.

This idea has had a huge impact on educational psychology and cognitive neuroscience, as well as applications in marketing and software design.

Imagine you’re a tech entrepreneur and you’re visiting a website and you see an advertisement for accounting software. The marketing material speaks about accounting and bookkeeping for architectural firms.

You go to another site and you see an ad for accounting software for tech startups.

For the sake of this thought experiment, Let’s assume you’re in the market for new accounting software. And let’s also assume the legal requirements for taxes for both industries are similar if not entirely the same. Which link do you click?

Science says you’re a lot more likely to click on links marketing to your industry. That’s the self-reference effect.

This effect has a lot of implications for how we market and sell our software, but it also plays a large role in the features we decide to build, the roadmaps, and how you onboard new users.

This concept has major implications for strategies like “product-led growth”