You have to think through your communication carefully or else it could send a different message than the one you intended. This one, for example, makes me want to run out and buy a bottle of JD just as fast as I can.
Warm up your audience
Sep292009
There are some interesting implications for how we do
advertising in some recent research on temperature. The
science blog Neurophilosophy asks, why is it that we have so
many metaphors which relate temperature to social distance? We
might, for example, hold “warm feelings” for somebody, and
extend them a “warm welcome”, while giving somebody else “the
cold shoulder” or “an icy stare”. These aren’t just figures
of speech: we judge others on the basis of warmth because
abstract concepts, such as affection, are firmly grounded in
bodily sensations.
Several different experiments have shown that physically
warming people up, by itself, causes them to feel warmer
relationships to the people and things around them. And the
interaction between social cognition and temperature is
bi-directional: warmer temperatures induce social proximity,
while loneliness makes people feel colder.
We don’t usually think about the physical temperature we
communicate in ads, at least not on a conscious level. But it
has an impact on how people feel about what they see in the
ad. It changes the nature of their engagement with the
characters in an ad. Since one of those characters is the
brand, that will also affect their future engagement with the
brand, not just the ad.
It would be interesting to compare the temperature profiles of
ad campaigns within categories, to see how that contributes to
the long term success of the brand. Corona’s warm tropical
breezes have been part of a long-term success story. Coors
Light finally broke through with a cold message– will the
brand be able to maintain a social bond among its users, or
will it establish a franchise of lonely losers who like thin
beer? That could of course be a huge franchise,
business-wise, but the focus groups would be grimly
depressing.
Thoughts and comments welcome.
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Foiled Again
Aug312009
Another nasty blow for traditional question-and-answer research to find out what consumers think about aesthetic materials. From an ingenious experiment reported in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, we learn that:
“Two experiments examined whether appreciating art verbally would aesthetically confuse viewers. Participants were asked to verbalize why they either liked or disliked two different kinds of paintings; one piece was representational, the other piece was abstract. Those who verbalized their reasons for liking the artworks were more likely to prefer the representational painting, whereas those who verbalized their reasons for disliking the paintings were also more likely to dislike the representational painting. While it was easy to describe reasons for both liking and disliking representational art, the same proved difficult for abstract art. The findings suggest that due to its figurative qualities people will be encouraged to generate reasons to describe representational art, rather than abstract art, and that these reasons could potentially be biased and cause them to change their preferences in line with these reasons.”
This study was about fine art, but it applies to advertising and design, as well. To interpret, the more representational (i.e. ‘left-brained’) an ad may be, the more reasons respondents will find to like it. The more abstract (i.e., ‘right-brained’) the fewer reasons they’ll find to like it. Ads that are abstract and emotional are fighting an uphill battle in focus groups and surveys when they’re pitted against ads that are literal and logical.
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Sit up and listen
Aug192009
We always think about reach, frequency, and cost per
impression when we evaluate media choices for an ad we want to
place. But we rarely if ever integrate the message with not
where, but how, the target audience receives it.
Research on how the body position of the recipient of a
message affects how they react to the message now shows that
both the ‘how’ and the ‘where’ matter. (Harmon-Jones, E., &
Peterson, C. K. (in press). Supine Body Position Reduces
Neural Response to Anger Evocation. Psychological Science)
Researchers found that when respondents were in a reclining
position, they were less likely to react by demonstrating
approach motivation, or the urge to move toward something.
Approach motivation is closely linked to positive activation.
Since this positive activation of emotion is what we usually
seek to elicit in advertising messages, that turns out to be
an important finding. If the viewer or listener is in a
reclining position, they are less likely to experience
positive approach motivation (defined as joy that urges one to
move toward the source of the joy).
The obvious issue here is television watching. Print ads,
radio, and interactive media are much more likely to be
accessed from a sitting position, compared to television (at
least that’s my assumption, there doesn’t seem to be much data
on that.) So the richness of television’s multimedia
experience may be working against the “LaZBoy factor”.
So how do we get the audience to sit up and listen? Maybe
with DRTV we need to get people to sit up with a free
sweepstakes offer or something, to increase their approach
motivation for the real offer.
And how about you? Do you sit up when you watch TV, or are you
lying down ignoring all those expensive ads we run?
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Mental Subtraction and the Whopper
Jul232009
Stimulating a strong emotional response on the part of the
viewer of an ad is critical if the ad is to be effective in
driving behavior. But that doesn’t necessarily tell us how to
create that emotional response from an ad. It just tells us we
want one.
Last week at our internal Lunch ‘n Learn, where we talked
about creative work, we looked at tv ads that had received
recognition in the business,and looked at how emotion worked
in those ads. Two of the most famous, and most-acclaimed,
were the original “Got Milk” ad, and the more-recent “Whopper
Freakout”. Both shared a common theme, taking away the brand
from the consumer rather than sharing it with him. I
suggested that the use of the counter-factual, absence rather
than presence of something, might have added emotional power.
It requires imagination, which can be a more powerful stimulus
than observation.
A new study in the Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology now provides some solid data to support that
interpretation. For years happiness researchers have done
studies showing that acts of gratitude, such as writing notes
of appreciation, can have a significant positive effect on
individuals’ life satisfaction and happiness. Now the power
of the counter-factual has also been established. As described
in Mind Matters:
“The researchers show that people prompted to write about how
a positive event may not have happened experience a greater
uptick in mood than those prompted to describe the positive
event.”
In other words, feeling appreciation for a relationship you
have may not make you feel as good as imagining what your life
might have been like if you had never met the person.
If this trick of mental subtraction (What if I’d never met my
husband?) works for relationships, it seems logical that it
works for other things too (What if I couldn’t get a Whopper?)
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Phineas in the news
Jul172009
From the blog of the British Psychological Society, comes the news that:
“A pair of photograph collectors in Maryland, USA, have uncovered what they believe to be the first and only ever photographic record of Phineas Gage -”.
We on the other hand, have the first and only bronze bust of the skull of Phineas, with tamping rod in situ.
If you’re interested, here’s the link.
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Emotions in Business
Jul72009
Interesting question on the LinkedIn Consumer Insights discussion group today: “How do you do a better job of giving clients an emotional reason to retain you?”
Here are my thoughts on it:
We need to be clear on what we really mean by emotion. The emotional bond a client feels toward an agency isn’t the emotional bond you have with your girlfriend. They may not even think of it as emotion, because it feels rational: it’s the confidence and trust they have that you’re going to solve their problems. It might be ROI, but more likely it’s guiding them to the right ideas, making things happen for them as marketers.
That might not seem like an emotion, but ultimately as a client, if you save my butt and my job, that’s a huge emotion. If you give me a crystal vase for the holidays, and buy me Super Bowl tickets, and tell me I’m wonderful, those are emotional reasons too. But they’ll never rise to the level of those big, butt-saving emotional moments.
Of course, it’s a lot easier to snag a pair of tickets, so do what you can.
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Neuromarketing
Jul22009
The Consumer Insights Interest Group on LinkedIn today had a question about “What is the future of neuromarketing?” For those of you not in that group, here was my comment:
There are three streams of neuromarketing, and all will become more important in the future, because neuroscience and psychology has turned our understanding of decision making upside down.
1. Deep understanding of what happens in the brain, using fMRI. This will remain a fundamental research tool that will help us understand consumers at a basic level. But it will not become usable for tactical, or even strategic, marketing applications, because it will remain very expensive.
2. Gross understanding of what happens in the brain. Using EEG to understand what areas of the brain are active in response to marketing stimuli will continue to have a place. As Howard notes, its value is so far not established. We already have the means to measure conscious, cognitive events that take place in the brain by using traditional question and answer research. What is missing is an ability to understand what is going on at the non-conscious level, where emotions assemble and correlate the data that eventually get summed up as a conscious decision. I believe that EEG is going to have a difficult task finding consistent data that correlates to those emotional events. However, I am not an EEG specialist, so I am prepared to be wrong.
3. Understanding fundamental non-conscious emotional response by observing outcomes of changes in the autonomic nervous system. These include changes in skin conductance, heart rate, facial muscles, and eye movement. Before anything happens in the brain, our body is already reacting, and all of these signals are easily measurable. Emotions happen in the heart, not in the brain. And yes, there is a bank of data that a marketer can understand. While these signals are easily measurable, they are not easily interpretable. That is the area that is underdeveloped, and that is what we are working on. The AnswerStream system we developed at Howard Merrell is such a bank of data.
Traditional survey and qualitative methods will never go away. But they will become just one part of the toolbox. As our understanding of how human beings use emotion to make decisions expands, the importance of the “rational” choices we measure with techniques like conjoint will shrink.
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Focus Group for Socks
Jun252009
http://www.vimeo.com/5324631
We don’t usually like focus groups here at HM&P, but this one was different. While pitching a sock manufacturer, we got a little group together and asked a few questions. Very insightful.
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Proust, Escoffier, HM&P
Jun242009
The intuitions of artists never get the respect as truth realized that scientists get when they find ‘truth’ in the lab. On the other hand, it’s the rare scientist that brings home a Damien-Hirst-style paycheck. They probably both trump advertising, but us ad folks are always working somewhere at the point where art meets science.
Art and science rarely meet as completely as in Jonah Lehrer’s first book, “Proust Was a Neuroscientist”, which is an absolute must-read for anyone who wants to understand the brain, emotions, and what it all means for advertising. The connection he makes between the fundamental truths of what great artists take from their own brains, and the science that has validated those truths is absolutely spell-binding. If you want to understand how to change the way people smell, feel, and taste the world– which is to say, if you’re one of us adfolk, you must read this book.
And while you’re at it, don’t miss his blog, either. Probably even more worthwhile than keeping up with Ashton Kutcher on Twitter.
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