People use fashion accessories like shoes to signal their membership in subgroups or social status, and powerful stories attached to products enhance this signaling value.

“Everybody in society is looking for signaling. You want to signal to people around you that you're doing well or you're part of some subgroup or you understand some part of culture very differently to somebody and people use accessories for that”

Richard Shotton contends that people are significantly more likely to remember concrete, visualizable concepts than abstract ideas.

“So, you are four times more likely to remember the thing that you can visualize. And Begg's explanation applies just as much to 2026. His argument is vision is the most powerful of our senses. So, if you use language you can visualize, it's very sticky.”

Consumers often use the amount of effort they perceive a company put into a product as a proxy for the product's actual quality.

“We use effort as a proxy for quality.”