The Magic of Seven
According to marketing psychologists it takes about seven reminders to inspire people to take action in response to a message.
When I read this I thought, “that seems like a lot of reminders. When I’m running an email campaign I really don’t want to bug all the people I know that much about my project.”
But then I got an idea. How about with each reminder I tell them something funny or interesting. Everyone likes to laugh. Why even some animals laugh, like hyenas and certain varieties of flatworm. And as for interesting, well no-one likes to be bored, right? Except for sheep, who actually enjoy it.
Anyhow, this thing about seven got me wondering, “Why seven? What is it with this number? Let’s see now…
- 7 Chakras
- 7 notes in the musical scale
- 7 Colours of the rainbow
- 7 Days of the week
- 7 Continents (not counting New Zealand)
- 7 Seas
- 7 Wonders of the World
- 7 Habits of Highly Successful People,
- 7 Dwarfs who were friends with Snow White
- Sting claims that Love is the 7th Wave
- 7 Samurai in Kurosawa’s classic movie. By the end there were only three left, but you know what I mean.
- And my friend Diamud has 7 brain cells.
This can’t all be coincidence, especially when you consider:
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- 7 Years of good luck
- or bad luck if you break a mirror
- 7 Deadly sins (I actually suspect there are a whole bunch of others, but our parents never told us as they didn’t want to give us even more ideas.)
- 7 Holy Sacraments
- 7 Hills of Rome
- 7 horsemen of the apocalypse. Just kidding. I know there are only four, which I think is already plenty!
That’s a pretty impressive list. Maybe seven is not such a bad thing after all.
And of course seven is the lowest number that cannot be represented as the sum of the squares of three integers. But you knew that.
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