Neuromarketing offers a very different perspective on advertising research than is found in traditional research methodologies. This new perspective embraces new answers to what might be called the three fundamental questions of advertising research: What is the purpose of advertising? How does advertising achieve its purpose? How can we best measure advertising effectiveness? According to […]
Consumer behavior: The gold standard of market research data In contrast to verbal expressions, actual consumer behavior is the real deal of market research. This is data that all marketers ultimately care about — where consumers shop, how they shop, what they buy, how much they pay, how often they buy, what they tell their […]
Rory Sutherland is an executive at the advertising and marketing firm Ogilvy, where he has developed a practice around behavioral economics called OgilvyChange. He gave an influential TED Talk in 2009 in which he argued that advertisers (and by extension, marketers) should not apologize for what they do but should celebrate the fact that they […]
Derren Brown is a British “mentalist” and entertainer. He has a number of fascinating videos over on You Tube, including this classic – quite simply, the most persuasive illustration of nonconscious processing I have ever seen: What lessons can we draw from this clever experiment? First, nonconscious processing exists. Our brains are busy taking in stimuli […]
A really fascinating, and in several ways disturbing study recently crossed my desk. Authored by Jennifer Harris, John Bargh, and Kelly Brownwell, the article is called “Priming Effects of Television Food Advertising on Eating Behavior”. It was published earlier this this year in Health Psychology. Abstract and online access are available here. The study shows in undeniable […]
Advertising is, of course, important from the market development point of view – but strangely enough it works largely because it’s of little importance to the consumer. Research and experience have shown that advertising messages that do not engage the conscious mind typically have more impact than those that cause the consumer to actively consider […]
In 2007 there were a number of reviews and appreciations of The Hidden Persuaders written to commemorate the 50th anniversary of its publication. I just finished reading a very interesting account by Michelle Nelson, called “The Hidden Persuaders, Then and Now,” published in the Journal of Advertising, Spring 2008. Diligent googling might find you a […]
A clever series of experiments is reported in the Journal of Consumer Research dealing with how people respond to advertising in context. Researchers Hao Shen, Yuwei Jiang, and Rashmi Adaval had people read pages from a mock magazine that contained articles (movie reviews for a film festival) and an ad (for a watch). Participants were randomly assigned […]
(I remain a big fan of Robert Heath, and highly recommend his new book, Seducing the Subconscious: The Psychology of Emotional Influence in Advertising.) I admit it, I’m a sucker for any argument that turns an established paradigm on its head. It’s hard to beat that little thrill you get when you realize everything we thought […]
A simplistic approach to advertising effectiveness tries to draw a straight line from an ad’s internal characteristics – its creativity, catchiness, product depiction, value proposition, memorable characters, etc. – to a product’s success in the marketplace. I was thinking about such claims when I came across a 2006 article from the Journal of Promotion Management: Stanton, […]
Five intuitive marketing principles marketers can start using today
In a recent article promoting my new book, Intuitive Marketing, I outlined some common mistakes marketers make when they try too hard to persuade consumers to buy their products and brands. That advice was necessarily negative—it described what not to do. Now I’d like to consider the opposite question: what are some positive ways marketers […]
The Mere Exposure Effect is Not a Silver Bullet for Marketers
Robert Zajonc first published his findings about the mere exposure effect in 1968. In an article titled “Attitudinal Effects of Mere Exposure,” he described a series of experimental findings that fundamentally challenged the psychological understanding of preferences accepted at the time. According to that understanding, preferences were a result of conscious thinking. Cognitions were believed […]
How Consistency, Reliability, and Trust Achieve Influence Without Persuasion
In the traditional model of persuasive marketing, the purpose of marketing is assumed to be the achievement of short-term transactional persuasion. In the newer model of intuitive marketing, the purpose of marketing is seen as something very different: the achievement of long-term influence through deep and authentic customer relationships. When adopting the intuitive marketing perspective, […]
What Do Replication Failures Tell Us About Priming?
Despite extensive evidence for priming in general and behavior priming in particular, there has emerged in recent years a backlash against this research, based largely on the publication of a number of replication failures of highly-cited priming studies.[1] Some observers have suggested these results are symptomatic of a deeper replication crisis (sometimes called a reproducibility […]
10 mistakes persuasive marketing makes (and intuitive marketing avoids)
My book, Intuitive Marketing, challenges a fundamental assumption of traditional marketing—that the purpose of marketing (and advertising) is to persuade. I knew when I started this project in late 2014 that two things were true: First, marketing and advertising were starting to bug me. They were becoming more disruptive and intrusive every day and marketers […]
Science under the hood 5: Implicit decisions, Reverse inference
This post is part of a series covering the 10 most important scientific principles underlying neuromarketing. Implicit decisions As we establish in Chapter 1 (“What Neuromarketing Is and Isn’t”) and elaborate on throughout this book, human brains are cognitive misers — thinking is hard and we try to avoid it if we can. A particularly […]
Science under the hood 4: Low attention processing, Implicit memory
This post is part of a series covering the 10 most important scientific principles underlying neuromarketing. Low attention processing Another counterintuitive finding that is important to neuromarketing is the discovery that attention may not be good for advertising effectiveness. Attention would seem to be a necessary condition for advertising effectiveness, but brain research has shown […]
Science under the hood 3: Misattribution, Nonconscious goal pursuit
This post is part of a series covering the 10 most important scientific principles underlying neuromarketing. Misattribution One of the things scientists have learned from studying System 1 and System 2 processes separately is that System 1 is sloppy. It makes connections and guides behavior based on simple associations, not logic. When System 1 makes […]
Science under the hood 2: Emotional “somatic markers,” Processing fluency
This post is part of a series covering the 10 most important scientific principles underlying neuromarketing. Emotional “somatic markers” Emotions operate at two levels in our mental lives: one conscious, the other non- conscious. Conscious emotions are what we usually call feelings. Nonconscious emotions are what psychologists call affective states, and they include emotional somatic […]
Science under the hood 1: System 1 and System 2, Priming
This post is part of a series covering the 10 most important scientific principles underlying neuromarketing. System 1 and System 2 Daniel Kahneman didn’t invent the System 1–System 2 model of brain processes, but his work over the last several decades has popularized it as one of the most useful overarching frameworks for understanding how […]