Warm up your audience
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.
