Most Advanced, Yet Acceptable: The MAYA principle and marketing research
Editor’s note: Alex Holmes is director at Shape Insight, U.K.
Designer Raymond Loewy created the Most Advanced, Yet Acceptable (MAYA) principle as a framework for creating products that are both accepted and successful. The idea behind MAYA is that successful products balance what is already familiar with what is new or disruptive.
Loewy developed MAYA based on two insights:
- There is a point where designs became so unfamiliar they didn’t appeal to people.
- People are curious about new things, but they also fear the unknown.
Loewy’s insights are timeless. Thanks to behavioral science’s recent growth, we realize that people are naturally averse to both risk and loss. But we’re also consistently hearing that the speed of change has never been so fast.
There’s evidence that we’re in a period where MAYA should guide recommendations on whether marketers (re)shape their brand’s offerings or not.
Let’s look at this evidence and what it means for how we make research recommendations.
Are we in a period of MAYA?
The business perspective
Accenture’s 2024 Pulse of Change Index says that between 2019 and 2023, business leaders felt that disruption increased by 183%, with 88% further disruption predicted in 2024. But are businesses coping with this disruption?
Not according to research from Waldencroft, which reports that only 44% of leaders believe they’re equipped to deal with disruption. So why should our recommendations add to this challenge?
Advancement is not slowing down
The rate of change we’re all experiencing shows little sign of slowing. Funding for technology firms in Europe is stabilizing. Open AI has started to invest in brand marketing and opened the gates to agentic commerce.
This shouldn’t shock us, especially as disruption creates brand value. According to Kantar, 71% of the $9.3 trillion brand value added since 2006 comes from disruptor brands. This puts the value of disruption at $6.6 trillion – reason to recommend advancement over acceptability.
Is change an innovator’s dream or dilemma?
It’s reasonable to assume periods of fast change and disruption are an innovator’s dream. However, research by Circana says that consumer packaged goods innovation fell 20% between 2024 and 2025.
This is reinforced in the U.K., where the number of patent applications remained stagnant between 2019 and 2024, as did the number of new businesses launched. What’s striking about this is that periods of disruption – i.e., pandemics – should see the highest levels of innovation. To paraphrase Morgan Housel, World War II began with troops on horseback and ended by splitting an atom in half. This is the reverse of what we’ve seen.
Is it possible that the speed of change is outpacing innovators’ ability to act – or eroding their confidence to launch?
Old habits die hard: The case against advancement
We’re always being told that consumer habits are changing. That the world is in flux. And there’s some truth in it. But we can be guilty of underestimating how fast new habits take to adopt over old ones. People often refer to the statement based on Phillippa Lally’s research, “It takes 66 days to form a new habit.”
However, often we forget the small print to this finding. The speed of changing a behavior depends on how complex and embedded that behavior is.
For example, contactless payments are prevalent in the U.K. But cash usage has risen for the third year running. And landline telephone ownership was predicted to continue declining at a slow rate of 1.6% a year, despite 98% of UK adults owning mobile phones.
When you’re trying to change an established behavior, you’re fighting an uphill psychological battle. One way to overcome this is to make changes appear smaller by retaining consistency with prior behavior – two things research recommendations need to make clear.
Compounding consistency and slowing advancement
System 1’s Compound Creativity research shows that campaigns with the most consistent execution over a five-year period create 2.2 times more very large brand effects vs. the least consistent campaigns. This makes a compelling case for consistent creative execution vs. advancing it, especially as creative testing is a research staple for most businesses.
One reason for this is the exposure effect. This is where we develop a preference for things, people or ideas when we become more familiar with them through repeat exposure. Think of Coca Cola’s bottle or McDonald’s logo – consistent and recognizable.
What does this all mean for researcher’s recommendations?
Remind our stakeholders they’re different
Andrew Tenzer and Ian Murray’s research into how marketers and the general population compare has a simple message: Marketers have different aspirations to the mainstream. This means they’re more likely to want the most advanced and eschew the most acceptable. Researchers need to remind marketing stakeholders of this to prevent them overly focusing on advancement over acceptability.
Reframe how recommendations communicate change
Too often, our recommendations focus on what to change. We feel that “new news” is necessary for research ROI. But where necessary, we need to be bolder in recommending against change or advancement. Doing so could help prevent embarrassing situations like the Gap or Burger King logo reversals.
Define what’s acceptable to keep consistent
Before using the MAYA approach to inform research recommendations, we need to define what is acceptable/consistent to both the business and the consumer. The answers will be different. Aspiring to keep what matters most to both is essential.