Digital Summit is coming back to Atlanta on October 6–7, 2026. If you work in marketing, do mark that on your calendar. The best agencies never stop learning.
Back at Digital Summit 2015, behavioral psychologist Matt Wallaert asked the audience a simple question: why do people love M&Ms? The answer wasn’t about the chocolate. It was about availability.
M&Ms are everywhere, in every store, big and small, in every gas station nationwide. They’re affordable, come in all kinds of flavors, and they’re visually appealing. That observation opened up a framework that still shapes how we feel about digital marketing today.
Marketing involves promoting and inhibiting pressures
Wallaert’s core argument is this: human behavior is driven by two competing forces. Promoting pressures push us toward an action. Inhibiting pressures hold us back.
Every decision a customer makes — clicking a link, filling out a form, buying a product — is the result of those two forces playing out in real time.
He illustrated this with an experiment he ran on his own coworkers. When he left a bowl of M&Ms on his desk within easy reach of the guest chair, people grabbed a handful almost every time. When he moved the bowl just out of arm’s reach, consumption dropped dramatically. The inhibiting pressure of a few extra inches was enough to change behavior.
If you want people to take action, you have to make it as easy as possible. If your marketing isn’t converting, the problem might not be your message. It might be friction you haven’t noticed yet.
What this means for your website and brand experience
The promoting and inhibiting behavioral framework applies directly to how your website works—and how your brand is perceived at every touchpoint.
A confused user is an inhibited user. If your site has confusing visual cues, takes too long to load, buries the contact form, or sends mixed signals about what you do, you’ve created psychological distance between the visitor and the action you want them to take. These are challenges our Atlanta web design team considers on every project.
The same principle extends to brand consistency. When your visual brand identity, messaging, and tone are aligned across your website, social channels, and ads, you reduce cognitive friction. Customers don’t have to work to understand who you are. Clarity builds trust. Trust lowers inhibiting pressure.
One often-overlooked element of brand consistency is color. The psychology of color in branding is well-documented: different hues trigger different emotional responses, and inconsistency across platforms creates subtle doubt in the mind of a potential customer.
Blue signals trust. Red creates urgency. Green suggests health and growth. When a brand uses these cues intentionally and consistently, the promoting pressure to engage goes up.
Rarebreed Veterinary Partners is a good example of this in action.
When you look at Rarebreed’s brand across their website, print materials, and campaigns, blue shows up consistently and deliberately. Blue communicates calm, trust, and professionalism. Paired with tones of pink and green, the palette stays warm without losing its professional footing. The result is a brand that signals exactly the right things to exactly the right audience at every touchpoint.
Friction is often invisible until you look for it
Most businesses don’t realize how much friction they’ve built into their customer journey. Ask yourself a few honest questions:
- Is your CTA buried below the fold?
- Is your contact form asking for more than it needs?
- Does your main navigation actually guide people, or is it a mega menu that looks impressive but overwhelms?
- Are your brand visuals consistent enough to look established, or are they sending mixed signals across channels?
If any of those made you wince, that’s friction. And friction equals lost business.
Wallaert’s framework gives us a practical diagnostic question: for every step in your funnel, ask not just “what will make someone do this?” but “what’s stopping them?”
Remove that barrier, and you’ve done more for your conversion rate than any ad campaign could.
Behavioral insight meets modern digital strategy
The intersection of psychology and marketing isn’t new, but it’s becoming more precise. Today’s tools — from heatmaps and A/B testing to AI-driven personalization — enable marketers to identify inhibiting pressures at scale and act on them faster than ever.
Our work in marketing strategy is grounded in exactly this thinking: understand the audience deeply, remove the barriers between them and the outcome you want, and make the promoting case as compelling as possible.
It’s also worth noting how this connects to search behavior. When someone types a question into Google — or increasingly, into an AI assistant — they’re expressing a promoting pressure. They want an answer. Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) is about making sure your brand shows up and delivers that answer clearly, before the inhibiting pressure of irrelevant results sends them somewhere else.
The takeaway from a bowl of candy
A decade after that Digital Summit session, Wallaert’s M&Ms example still holds up because it cuts to the heart of how people work. We don’t make purely rational decisions. We respond to our environment, to ease, to visual cues, and to the path of least resistance.
As marketers, our job is to engineer that environment. Make the right action the obvious one. Align your brand to build confidence, not confusion. And never stop asking why someone didn’t do something…because that’s usually where the real opportunity is hiding.
Not sure what’s creating friction in your customer journey? Let our marketing team take a look. Reach out today. We proudly serve businesses throughout Georgia, including Alpharetta, Duluth, Marietta, and Roswell.