My good friend and colleague Erik du Plessis wants to set the record straight. Too many people, he believes, are misinterpreting his book The Advertised Mind, mistakenly concluding that emotions dominate our thinking, and that, as a result, our decision making is irrational and unpredictable. On Friday, at a set of presentations hosted by Millward Brown South Africa, he set out to address this misunderstanding.
Erik’s introduction was delivered in his inimitable style. Recognizing that the preceding two presentations had run a little long, he offered a stand-up routine to allow people time to have a quick smoke and bathroom break. The serious stuff, he announced, would not start for another 10 minutes. He then proceeded to tell the audience why they should be glad to have a smoker as a presenter, a pilot, or, for that matter, a market researcher. Smokers, it seems, will do everything quicker in order to make time for a cigarette break.
Having reduced the audience to laughter, Erik then turned to the meat of his presentation: emotions, feelings and personality. I cannot hope to replicate his full presentation in this post but will give you my key takeaways and allow Erik to comment as he sees fit.
Emotions are important to advertising because they direct our attention and, as a result, help ensure our survival. But emotions are not the same as the feelings, fundamental human drives (such as hunger, thirst, comfort, affiliation), and personality traits that motivate us to buy specific brands and become loyal to them.
Before we can consciously appreciate and consider what is happening around us, we need to be alerted to its importance to us. Based on the pre-existing "soma," that is, the potential we associate with objects and events around us, our emotions direct our attention to specific things.
Importantly, once our attention is engaged, the emotions that directed our attention are open to introspection. We know that we are frightened, attracted, or disgusted. If the emotion is not strong enough to engage our conscious attention, its influence will be weak at best.
Because emotions direct our attention quickly and effectively based on the electro-neural activity in our brain, they have an important role to play in advertising: to direct our attention and ensure continued engagement. But emotions are also transitory; they do not last more than a few seconds.
Our relationship with brands lasts far longer than a few seconds. What, then, determines our brand allegiance?
Erik argues that this is the domain not of emotion but of background feelings - which you could also think of as moods - and in the even longer term, personality. Feelings, he suggests, are determined by chemo-neural processes, not electro-neural ones, and their influence on our behavior lasts far longer.
Critical to the "biology" of brands is the concept of homeostasis: bodily balance. If we have not eaten for a while, our body starts to run out of the glucose it needs to function properly. We start feeling hungry. This predisposes us to notice and pay attention to food, and creates an expectation of the positive feeling of satisfying our hunger.
In most animals, this process is handled without any planning. They feel hungry, look for food, and eat it. We humans, however, have an executive capacity that allows us to plan ahead. We know we are going to feel hungry, so we write shopping lists, go to the store, and lay in supplies.
Once we get to the store, what determines the brand we choose? Erik proposes that this is the domain of the "reward circuit," which relies on the release of dopamine and other neurotransmitters. It is the anticipation of how much pleasure we will get from consuming one brand versus another that determines which one we buy. Since this is the same circuit that governs addiction to drugs, marketers are essentially trying to "addict" consumers to one brand or another.
It is important to realize that it is the anticipation of consumption that releases dopamine, not just the actual experience. As a result, advertising and point-of-purchase materials that focus attention on the pleasure of consumption can have a very profound effect. Our own pretesting results point to the importance of the "bite and smile" shot in food advertising. You may remember that my post "Rehearsing reality" touched on this topic.
Importantly, the anticipated pleasure derives not just from functional rewards but from emotional and social benefits as well. We are motivated by anything that makes us feel balanced and happy. It might be the pleasure of quelling our hunger with a Big Mac or the satisfaction of announcing our status by driving a Mercedes.
Lacking Erik’s prodigious appetite for reading academic and scientific literature, I am ill qualified to comment on his reasoning. What I can say is that there is a marked convergence between his thinking and that of others. In listening to Erik’s presentation, I was strongly reminded of an article by written by Michel Cabanac, which proposed that pleasure was the currency of decision making (link to abstract here), and another by Robert Aunger and Valerie Curtis, which examined the relationship between reactive, motivational, and executive behaviors
I also remember one article in The New York Times titled, "In Clue to Addiction, Brain Injury Halts Smoking," which suggested that smokers with damage to a specific region of the brain associated with bodily balance, the insula, lost the craving for cigarettes. As one man put it, his body "forgot the urge to smoke." Scientists believe this knowledge will help them find a solution to addiction. But, based on Erik’s rationale about smokers, if the scientists are successful, does that mean our presentations will run long and our flights arrive late?
So how do you feel about Erik’s ideas? Do you believe that our brand choices can ultimately be traced back to chemo-neurological processes? If so, what might the implications be for marketing? Please share your thoughts with us.
Tags: Millward Brown, Nigel Hollis, Erik Du Plessis, feelings, emotion, emotion in advertising, The Advertised Mind, Michel Cabanac, Val Curtis, Robert Aunger
(4 votes, average: 3 out of 5)
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