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"In the mid-1990s, studies began to suggest that
decision making,
long held to be a prime example of a mental process best accomplished without
the interference of emotions, could not only benefit from emotions, but also
might require them." - Jenny Lauren Lee People find a
comfortable predictable day to day manner of living preferable to living on
the thin edge of
not-life.
Individuals judge situations
confronted primarily through pattern
matching.
Although individuals
claim to reason to come to a
conclusion their actual decision is
based more upon a
"feeling" than on a rational decision.
Assume a consumer purchases a
product. The product works as advertised.
This consumer emotionally
registers satisfaction with the product.
That
emotional satisfaction
subconsciously brands the individual.
Subconscious emotional branding creates
the "correct" emotional
response.
We have the "right feeling" when we see the
product on the shelf the next time and that
right feeling induces
product loyalty.
To find profit in so many
similar items, marketers must brand a product on the buyer's mind.
Such efforts put the average American adult in the cross hairs of ~
3,000 advertising messages a day, five times more than two decades ago.
Children are exposed to ~ 40,000
advertisements every
year.
By the age of 18 months,
they can recognize
logos.
By 10, they have memorized 300 to 400 brand logos.
The average adult can recognize
thousands of brand
logos.
Many seemingly rational
decisions are reflexive snap
judgements, shaped by networks of neurons acting in concert.
"We are embedded in an enormous sea of cultural
messages, the neural influences of which we poorly understand.
We are
beginning to understand the
way in which messages
can gain control over our behavior." - neuroscientist Read Montague,
director of the Human Neuroimaging Laboratory at Baylor College of Medicine
in Houston These
orchestras of cells are
surprisingly malleable, readily responding to the influence of
experience.
The inescapable influence of
marketing brands minds.
Brand
marketing physically alters the brain structure.
Just as
practicing the piano or learning to read can physically alter areas of the
cerebral cortex, the
intense, repetitive stimulation of marketing shapes susceptible brain circuits
involved in decision making.
While
monitoring brain activity
directly researchers make inquiries into
consumer choice by
harnessing techniques
pioneered for medical diagnosis:
positron emission tomography
measures brain chemical
activity;
magnetic
resonance imagery measures the magnetic fields of the brain;
functional magnetic resonance measures
blood flow around neurons.
"This is a way of prying open the jar and seeing
what is inside." - psychologist Jonathan Cohen, director of Princeton
University's Center for the Study of Brain, Mind, &
Behavior
In the mind's eye,
celebrity faces trigger
many of the same circuits as images of shoes, cars,
chairs, wristwatches,
sunglasses, handbags
and water bottles.
Objects and
celebrity faces
are reduced to a common denominator:
a spasm of synapses in a part
of the cortex called Brodmann's area 10, a region associated with
a sense of identity and social
image.
None of
these neural responses come consciously to mind when a shopper is browsing
brand labels.
Much of what is considered
the product of logic and
deliberation is actually driven by primitive neural systems responsible for
automatic emotional response processes that
evolved to manage conflicts
between sex,
hunger, thirst and the other
elemental appetites of
survival.
In recent years,
researchers have
discovered that regions such as the amygdala, the hippocampus and
the hypothalamus are dynamic switchboards that
blend memory,
emotions and
biochemical triggers.
These
interconnected neurons
shape the way
fear,
panic,
exhilaration and
social pressure influence the
choices made.
Political
beliefs trigger the same
malleable circuits of reward, identity,
desire and
threat that
product branding does.
Lattices of neurons are linked, then continually
revised, by experience.
Conversly
they are burnt to a crisp by major traumatic experience.
So intimate
is this feedback that there is no way to
separate the brain's neural
structure from the influence of the
world that surrounds it.
Once researchers learned to map
the anatomy of behavior
they realized that the brain, shaped by the
interplay of genes
and environment, is
malleable.
There is
a fundamental
disconnect between consumers and providers.
Advertising is
predicated on marketing but it's no trick to sell people what they want;
the trick is to make people
want to buy what you have to sell.
When you succeed,
you're a salesman.
Otherwise, you're simply a
clerk.
Media advertisements are
designed to be salespersons,
not clerks.
Consumers think purchasing decisions
are within their control.
Knowing they are
being manipulated into making a
purchase, they recoil.
Knowing ads are designed to "sell" they still think themselves immune.
This is known as the blind spot
bias.
People want to be entertained but refuse to see entertainment
is, in fact, merely a vehicle for inducing them
to purchase an advertised products.
They want the boundaries between
entertainment and advertising pitches to be clearly delineated. That
delineation is the last thing business wants.
Consumers of
entertainment need to understand how they are manipulated.
When
consumers found the remote, the videotape and TiVo they zapped commercials.
Advertisers returned the volley with product placement.
In feature
films, where advertising had never established the foothold it had in
television and other media venues, deals between producers and advertisers have
flourished.
Studios are paid large fees for conspicuously placing
products in a scene or making brand name products part of the storyline.
The following is an actual proposal for product placement:
Dear
Mr. Smith,
We are about to go into production with the motion picture,
"Run, Sheep, Run", a suspense thriller, set in Los Angeles.
If there is
any interest from your company, and I'm sure there must be, the film is better
than any commercial that has been run on television or any magazine, because
the audience is totally unaware of the sponsor involvement, I would like to
have from your company the suggested brands for the people as listed above and
the necessary cartons of cigarettes to be used.
We would enter a
contract, that upon delivery of the answer print to the distributor, your
company, Reynolds Tobacco, would pay to our production company, the sum of
$500,000.00.
If for any reason the film is not distributed, then your
company is out only the time in answering my letter, and a few packages of
cigarettes, I think this protects both of us .
I expect to hear from
you very shortly.
Robert P. Richards 08/25/72
Product placement,
visual or auditory, is superior to straight commercials as people generally put
up defenses against invitations to a purchase.
Product placement
circumvents these defenses
and places the product in the
mind's eye for
future influence.
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