Author: tom

Categories
advertising

they want your mind, not your attention

In the comments to an earlier post on advertising, Helen said

We tend to take in less information than advertisers thought or hoped: generally about three seconds worth. Also the more they try and bombard us the quicker we ‘shut down’….we have become very selective in our information uptake and processing. [Experiments have] also found that products were negatively rated if the advert was particularly intrusive/annoying /or stopped us doing something (eg those pop ups on the internet). Maybe we will have less intrusive but more effective advertising in the future on the basis of this…? Be thankful that right now it may be annoying but that you automatically cut it out after three seconds so has little effect on you.

I think Helen is thinking of this article from New Scientist Is advertising flogging a dead horse? (24 December 2005). Which contains quotes such as


They used a camera embedded in a pair of glasses to record people’s gaze as they glanced at ads during a shopping trip or journey to work. After analysing the recordings and questioning the subjects, they found that most of the ads made no impression at all: only around 1 per cent could be recalled without prompting. It seems that although we may be looking at brands and advertisements all day long, most of the time we’re not taking anything in.

Which makes the dangerous assumption that if you can’t consciously and spontaneously recall information you didn’t absorb it at the time and aren’t affected by it now (there’s an example of an experiment showing otherwise here: music, wine and will).

Later in the article, the corollary of this assumption is explicitly spelt out:


In short, the reason most advertising doesn’t work is that we’re in a chronic state of attentional overload. Unless advertising is presented in a way the brain can absorb, it is simply not seen

Sure, if you want people’s focal attention, their conscious deliberation and their active support then it is going to be harder and harder when they are bombarded by a million different messages and a million different demands on their time. But although adverts may work this way – or some adverts at least – that doesn’t mean that all adverts do. Some kinds of advertising may work better when you’re not paying attention and when you’re not consciously deliberating about the values they are inculcating in you.

Relevant link: Guardian article about the healthy mental environment movement

Categories
advertising

music, wine and will

You go to the supermarket and stop by some shelves offering French and German wine. You buy a bottle of French wine. After going through the checkout you are asked what made you choose that bottle of wine. You say something like “It was the right price”, or “I liked the label”. Did you notice the French music playing as you took it off the shelf? You probably did. Did it affect your choice of wine? No, you say, it didn’t.

That’s funny because on the days we play French music nearly 80% of people buying wine from those shelves choose French wine, and on the days we play German music the opposite happens

This study was done by Adrian North and colleagues from the University of Leicester [1]. They played traditional French (accordion music) or traditional German (a Bierkeller brass band – oompah music) music at customers and watched the sales of wine from their experimental wine shelves, which contained French and German wine matched for price and flavour. On French music days 77% of the wine sold was French, on German music days 73% was German – in other words, if you took some wine off their shelves you were 3 or 4 times more likely to choose a wine that matched the music than wine that didn’t match the music.

Did people notice the music? Probably in a vague sort of way. But only 1 out of 44 customers who agreed to answer some questions at the checkout spontaneously mentioned it as the reason they bought the wine. When asked specifically if they thought that the music affected their choice 86% said that it didn’t. The behavioural influence of the music was massive, but the customers didn’t notice or believe that it was affecting them. Similar experiments have shown that classical music can make people buy more expensive wine [2], or spend more in restaurants [3].

Is this manipulation? There’s no coercion, all the customers are certainly wine buyers who are probably more or less in the mood to buy some wine. But they have been influenced in what kind of wine they buy and they don’t know that they have.

What would be the effect, I wonder, of having someone stand by the shelves saying to the customers as they passed “Why don’t you buy a French wine today”? My hunch is that you’d make people think about their decision a lot more – just by trying to persuade them you’d turn the decision from a low involvement one into a high involvement one. People would start to discount your suggestion. But the suggestion made by the music doesn’t trigger any kind of monitoring. Instead, the authors of this study believe, it triggers memories associated with the music – preferences and frames of reference. Simply put, hearing the French music activates [4] ideas of ‘Frenchness’ – maybe making customers remember how much they like French wine, or how much they enjoyed their last trip to France. For a decision which people aren’t very involved with, with low costs either way (both the French and German wines are pretty similar, remember, except for their nationality) this is enough to swing the choice.

This priming affect is, I believe, one of the major ways advertising works [5]. Simply by making it more likely for us to remember certain things, we are more likely to make decisions biased in a certain way. There’s no compulsion, nobody has their free-will wrenched from their conscious grip. There’s just an environment shaped a certain way to encourage certain ideas. And how could anything be wrong with that?

Refs & Footnotes:

[1] Adrian C. North, David J. Hargreaves, and Jennifer McKendrick? (1997). In-store music affects product choice. Nature, 390, 132.
Adrian C. North, David J. Hargreaves, and Jennifer McKendrick? (1999). The influence of in-store music on wine selections. Journal of Applied Psychology, 84, 271-276.

[2] Areni, C. S. and Kim, D. (1993). The influence of background music on shopping behavior: classical versus top-forty music in a wine store. Advances in Consumer Research, 20, 336-340.

[3] North, A. C., Shilcock, A., and Hargreaves, D. J. (2003). The effect of musical style on restaurant customers

Categories
advertising quotes

Give a man a mask and he’ll tell you the truth?

For while there is clearly a mask, there is nothing behind it; it is a surface which conceals nothing but itself, and yet in so far as it suggests there is something behind it, prevents us from considering it as surface

J.L.Baudry (Afterimage, No. 5, Spring 1974, p.27)
quoted in Judith Williamson’s Decoding Advertisements: Ideology and Meaning in Advertising(p.71)

Categories
advertising

experimental psychology of advertising resources

A few places where you can enjoy the intersection between experimental psychology and marketing research are at:

(labs)

The Food and Brand Lab (was ‘The Illinois Food and Brand lab’, but has now moved to Cornell) found at consumerpsychology.net

The Bangor University: The Experimental Consumer Psychology research group – see this article in New Scientist about Jane Raymond’s research Is advertising flogging a dead horse? (New Scientist, 24 December 2005).

(associations)

The Association for Consumer Research

Society for Consumer Psychology

(journals)

Journal of Consumer Psychology

The Journal of Consumer Behaviour (defunct?)

Journal of Marketing

Journal of Marketing Research

(updated)

Psychology and Marketing

[Cross posted at mindhacks.com]

Categories
advertising

Cognitive psychology & advertising

Here’s another approach to understanding how adverts work – cognitive psychology, as discussed in this Wired article from 2002 (thanks Lauren!)

You’ll probably not be surprised that I’ve lots of sympathy for experimenal psychology as a method for understanding adverts (as opposed to, say, semiotics). A conventional experimental cognitive psychology approach to understanding something about advertising would be:

1. Have an idea, e.g., I think Factor X makes people buy more stuff
2. Come up with an experiment which involves two situations which are identical except for the presence/absence of Factor X.
3. Include some measure which is a good enouch approximation for the behaviour ‘buying’ (it could be actual purchases, or it could be something like memory for the product, or extent of positive feelings for the product, which we just assume will convert into sales)
4. Do the experiment, write up the results, let the rest of the (psychology) world criticise your experiment
5. Do follow-up experiments to re-test your idea and counter criticisms.

Or something like that anyway. Here’s an example from the Wired article:


One example: At the University of Texas at Austin, cognitive science professor Art Markman gave a group of hungry people a few bites of popcorn. Another group got no food. Then he showed his volunteers pictures of products

Categories
advertising

Decoding Advertisements

[Cross posted at mindhacks.com]

Judith Williamson’s ‘Decoding Advertisements’ is a classic look at the semiotics of advertising – about how adverts construct and promolgate meaning, necessarily involving the customer in a system of signs and symbols, as a token in that system. It’s a great book and, in some sense, a forerunner of Naomi Klein’s book on Brands, No Logo

I’m going to talk about it because it is exactly not what I am interested in in terms of advertising and psychology.

The first advert discussed in the book (shown below, p18 in the book) is an advert for car tyres. The advert shows a car stopped just before the end of a jetty; the text reports how they drove the car 36,000 miles and then did an emergency stop to test the quality of the tyres. They stopped fine – in other words, ‘these are good tyres’. But – aha! – says Judith Williamson – that is just the overt message of the advert. The covert message of the advert is captured in the image

a1.jpg

The outside of the jetty resembles the outside of a tyre and the curve is suggestive of its shape: the whole jetty is one big tyre…The jetty is tough and strong, it withstands water and erosion and does not wear down: because of the visual resemblance we assume that this is true of the tyre as well. In the picture the jetty actually encloses the car, protectively surrounding it with solidity in the middle of dangerous water: similarly, the whole safety of the car and driver is wrapped up in the tyre, which stands up to the elements and supports the car. Thus what seemed to be merely a part of the apparatus for conveying a message about braking speed, turns out to be a message in itself, one that works not on the overt but almost on the unconscious level; and one which involves a connection being made, a correlation between two objects (tyre and jetty) not on a rational basis but by a leap made on the basis of appearance, juxtaposition and connotation.

Is this true? Do the qualities of the jetty occur to us and transfer to the tyres? Does this happen covertly, on an ‘almost unconscious level’. Does this magic bypass the normal rational monitoring of our thoughts? Well, it could be true, maybe. But also, something like it could be true – maybe the image really plays the role of a phallic symbol and suggest to the viewer thoughts of masculine strength and durability. Or maybe something contradictory but similar in style is true – does the image suggest danger, when the tyres are meant to make you feel safe, so that really it is a bad advert. Or maybe people just like to look at a nice picture of a jetty in the sea. Or maybe they like the curves of the jetty, and this makes them feel positive about the thing they see at the same time (the logo of the tyre manufacturer). All of these things could be true – I don’t believe Judith Williamson has any more idea than us which are true, and this is why I’m not interested in the semiotics of advertising at the moment.

The argument advanced in ‘Decoding Advertisements’ misses a critical step. Can it be shown that covert visual imagery affects consumer’s buying behaviour? I don’t doubt that covert visual imagery exists, nor even that in some circumstances has an effect, but does it have an effect in adverts? Till the whole class of influences talked about is demonstrated to be in operation, why should I believe these analyses of adverts are any more than psychoanalytic-spook stories?

So, while I’m alive to the use of decoding adverts using semiotics, the first stops on my investigation into adverts will be

  • the experimental evidence which shows that adverts do have an effect

    • and

  • the experimental evidence on what sorts of things affect behaviours

    • By ‘sorts of things’ I mean general categories like ‘new information’, ‘social influence’, ‘status’, ‘sex appeal’, ‘positive emotions’ – all things that at first glance seem more likely to be factors in adverts’ success. I’ll leave the fine, critical-theory, detail for later, and until I can be persuaded that, in an advert, a jetty is more than just a jetty.

    Ref:

    Williamson, Judith. (1978). Decoding Advertisements: Ideology and Meaning in Advertising. London: Boyars. You can get a flavour for the book from this discussion, which includes examples. Judith Williamson is a flag on the fantastic semiotics black run.

    Categories
    advertising

    Is there a science of advertising?

    Does advertising work? If it does work, how does it work? And given this, should we be worried about what advertisers do? These are, broadly, the questions I’m interested in and the topics I am going to be posting about for the next month. Aside from sheer curiousity, I’m chairing a discussion on the topic of advertising and psychology on March 6th at Cafe Scientifique, Sheffield.

    Here’s the blurb:


    Do adverts work? How do they work? And is it a problem?

    Most of us don’t think we’re particularly affected by adverts, but it can’t be for nothing that the advertising industry in the UK spent

    Categories
    links

    links for 26th January 2006

    Categories
    politics

    bloodless regieme change

    There’s an uncharacteristically gushing (and inspiring) story in this week’s Economist about the possibility of internally-driven, bloodless, regieme change in dictatorships. Some selective quotes (article here, paywalled):

    But all the evidence is that people power, if it is to bring about a lasting change that increases freedom, must bubble up from below. It must be indigenous, broad-based and, ideally, non-violent.

    …

    Moreover, the most important factor in contributing to the emergence of a freer society is the presence of strong and cohesive non-violent civic coalitions.

    …

    It may take years to develop, and it may not always turn out quite as is hoped, but people power is catching: the more often it works, the more often it will be used.

    Categories
    quotes

    people ain’t no good


    People just ain’t no good
    I think that’s well understood
    You can see it everywhere you look
    People just ain’t no good

    …

    It ain’t that in their hearts they’re bad
    They can comfort you, some even try
    They nurse you when you’re ill of health
    They bury you when you go and die
    It ain’t that in their hearts they’re bad
    They’d stick by you if they could
    But that’s just bullshit
    People just ain’t no good

    People they ain’t no good
    People they ain’t no good
    People they ain’t no good
    People they ain’t no good at all

    Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, ‘People Ain’t No Good’

    Categories
    quotes

    Quote #129

    Most fortunately it happens, that since reason is incapable of dispelling these clouds, Nature herself suffices to that purpose, and cures me of this philosophical melancholy and delirium, either by the relaxing this bent of mind, or by some avocation, and lively impression of my senses, which obliterate all these chimeras. I dine, I play a game of backgammon, I converse, I am merry with my friends; and when, after three or four hours amusement, I would return to these speculations, they appear so cold, and strained, and ridiculous, that I cannot find in my heart to enter into them any further

    David Hume

    Categories
    politics

    Own the whales

    Hubert’s had a great idea – it will be the first in a series of libertarian environmentalist direct-actions. Now, there’s a school of thought – offensive to many on the left – that environmental exploitation happens precisely because a resource is held in common, rather than owned by someone (who therefore has an interest in using it wisely). Wasn’t resource mismanagement the original inspiration for the tragedy of the commons idiom, after all? So if everything, everywhere – every rare species, every piece of rainforest, etc – is owned by someone, they might be protected better.

    So here’s the plan; if the Japanese Whaling Ships can go into international waters and harpoon whales – essentially saying “This one is mine” and killing it – what’s to stop me going and tagging a whale with my name and mobile number, attaching a GPS – essentially saying “This one is mine” – and letting it go free? Then when the Japanese Whalers come across a whale they have to check if it is unowned, or whether they need my permission to take it and kill it. “What happens when they kill it anyway?” I asked Hubert. “Simple”, he said, “I sue them.”

    “And”, he continued, “the great thing about this strategy is that it is very empowering for the individual. You don’t have to wait for governments to pass environmental legislation, you just get out there and see what the court system decides.”

    Categories
    links

    links from brussels

    Categories
    politics

    work, feminism and private life

    [From Madeleine Bunting’s ‘Willing Slaves: How the overwork culture is ruling our lives’ (2004, p306-7) after a section on the commercialisation of intimate life – paid therapists for emotional support, paid visitors for your nursing-homed mother, etc:]

    Ten years ago, there was still a debate about whether women should be working; young women now regard the idea that they should stay at home as simply absurd. Some debates have been settled, but that only increase the stakes of those questions which remain.

    A new and dangerous frontier has been opened up: if women have moved into the workplace only for their traditional caring labour to be abandoned, outsourced or squeezed to the edges, we will all suffer for it. The mission of feminism to achieve equality will hijacked by a capitalism eager for cheap, flexible labour and emotional skills on its terms. What we will reap is exhausted men and women, neglected children, loneliness, relationship breakdown and everyone short-changed of the well-being which is a product of the bonds of care. This threatens a commodification of the emotional life; in parallel developments emotional skills play an ever bigger part in the labour market while private emotional relationships are starved of the time and energy which they need to flourish, and are then outsourced. This would be the final triumph of market capitalism, whereby the separate sphere which once belonged to women, and from which the market was excluded – of the private life, of home and family – is opened up for commercialisation. The pressure bearing down on the reciprocity and commitment of these private relationships is colossal; it’s a tribute to the strength of many individuals that they struggle to hold true to their intuitive understanding of relationship. It would be a tragic betrayal of the grand vision of twentieth-century feminism if it had inadvertently contributed to the market

    Categories
    quotes

    Quote #125

    “So, from a certain point of view, economics is all about reaching global consensus on what’s the ‘general good’…From another point of view, it’s a technocratic elite building a global dictatorship of profound depth and subtlety.”

    Dan, 7/12/05

    Categories
    politics

    biographic solutions to structural contradictions

    [talking about the way corporations have embraced aspirational culture, making self-improvement part of the benefits/goals of employment]

    “But the philosophy of improving ‘personal performance’ also plays into the hands of employers’ rationale that well-being and coping with stress are the responsibility of the individual employeee. It reinforces the tendency for individuals to search for ‘biographic solutions to structural contradictions’, as the sociologist Ulrich Beck put it: forget the barricades, it’s revolution from within that matters. This cultural preoccupation with personal salvation stymies collective reform, and places an onerous burden on the individual. It effectively reinforces the anxieties and insecurities which it offers to assuage” [Bunting, 2004, ]

    Madeleine Bunting. Willing Slaves: How the overwork culture is ruling our lives (2004), p. 200

    Categories
    politics

    Market capitalism fosters prosociality

    [Talking about how the development of market capitalism has relied on the cultivation of trust between actors who do not know each other personally]

    “Now i realise how improbable this sounds. Markets, we know, foster selfishness and greed, not trust and fairness. But even if you find the history unconvincing, there is this to consider: in the late 1990s, under the supervision of [Samuel] Bowles, twelve field researchers – including eleven anthropologists and one economist – went into fifteen “small-scale” societies (essentially small tribes that were, to varying degreesm self-contained) and got people to play the kinds of games in which experimental economics specialise. The societies included three that dependedon foraging for survival, six that used slash-and-burn techniques, four nomadic herding groups, and two small agricultural societies. The three gmaes the people were asked to play were the three standards of behavioural economics: the ultimatum game (which you just read about [if you were reading the book]), the public goods game (in which if everyone contributes, everyone goes away significantly better off, while if only a few people contribute, then the others can free ride on their effort), and the dictator game, which is similar to the ultimatum game except that the responder can’t say no to the proposer’s offer. The idea behind all these games is that they can be played in a purely rational manner, in which case the player protects himself against loss but forgoes the possibility of mutual gain. Or they can be played in a prosocial manner, which is what most people do.

    In any case, what the researchers found was that in every single society there was significant deviation from the purely rational strategy. But the deviations were not all in the same direction, so there were significant differences between the cultures. What was remarkable about the study, though, was this: the higher the degree to which a culture was integrated with the market, the greater the level of prosociality. People from more market-orientated societies made higher offers in the dicatator game and the ultimatum game, cooperator in the public goods game, and exhibited strong reciprocity when they had the chance.

    From James Suroweikcki. The Wisdom of Crowds – Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few (2004) [which i commented on in ignorance here], p.126. Refs for this study are:

    Joseph Henrich et al. “Economic Man in Cross-Cultural Perspective: Behavioral Experiments in Fifteen Small-Scale Societies”. Originally a Sante Fe Institute paper but then became a BBS paper.

    Henrich et al. (2001). In Search of Homo Economicus: Behavioral Experiments in 15 Small-Scale Societies. American Economic Review 91, 73-78. PDF here

    What i love about the behavioral economics paradigms is that prosocial behaviour validates itself. Once you drop the narrow, economic, one-shot, sense of the word ‘rational’, it is rational to cooperate in these games because it is rational to cooperate if you think others will cooperate and it is rational for them to cooperate if they think you will.

    Surowiecki also discusses [p.106] Vernon Smith, who showed experimentally that a free market of real people with imperfect imformation etc could still be near-optimal in efficiency terms. Apparently a major economics journal wasn’t interested in the result because it had already been demonstrated that markets were efficient theoretically. On the same page Surowiecki aknowledges the caveat that economic efficiency tells us nothing about the social cost of market operation

    Categories
    sheffield

    free wifi in sheffield, uk

    A google for the phrase “free wifi sheffield uk” doesn’t turn up much useful information, so here’s my list. Let me know if you know of anywhere else.

    Free wifi hotspots in Sheffield, England:

  • The Showroom – independent cinema and cafe bar near the station
  • The Rutland Arms, Paternoster Row – also near the station, and opposite Access Space
  • The Runaway Girl, 111 Arundel St, S1 2NT (and they do bottomless coffee for
    • Categories
    quotes

    human sustainability

    The policies of the eighties and nineties…were based, John Gray argued in his book False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism (1998), on ‘the theory that market freedoms are natural and political restraints on markets are artifical. The truth is that free markets are creatures of state power, and persist only so long as the state is able to prevent human needs for security and the control of economic risk from finding political expression.’

    …

    Just as the late twentieth century grasped the fact that there was a crisis of environmental sustainability, the twenty-first century is beginning to grasp the dimensions of a comparable crisis, this time of human sustainability – a scarcity of the conditions which nurture resilient, secure individuals, familities, friendships and communities.

    Madeleine Bunting. Willing Slaves: How the overwork culture is ruling our lives (2004). p. xx-xxi

    Categories
    quotes

    Quote #123 (Why we love books)

    Why does this strike such a nerve? Because so many of us (not only authors) love books. In their combination of mortal, physical embodiment with immortal, disembodied knowledge, books are the mirror of ourselves. Books are not mere physical objects. They have a life of their own. Wholesale scanning, we fear, will strip our books of their souls. Works that were sewn together by hand, one chapter at a time, should not be unbound page by page and distributed click by click. Talk about “snippets” makes authors flinch.

    George Dyson on Edge.org

    Categories
    links

    link roundup 28 dec 05

    Categories
    quotes

    Life is open

    So the biosphere appears to be doing something that we cannot describe beforehand – not because of quantum indeterminacy of chaotic dynamic behavior but because we don’t have the concepts ahead of time.

    That, in turn, means that the space of relevant possibilities of the biosphere – its phase space – cannot be prestated. Thus the biosphere is creative in a way we cannot prestate. And that stands in marked contrast to what Newton brilliantly showed us how to do: In physics, in general, one can prestate the set of all possibilities – that is, the phase space – the consult the laws and the initial boundary conditions and calculate the forward trajectory of the particle in its phase space.

    I suspect we cannot state the phase space, the space of possibilities, in the biosphere. You might, if you are a physicist, say, “Well, if you treat the system classically, there is always the classical n-dimensional phase space of all the positions and velocities of the particles in the [somehow isolated] system.” That may be true, but then you do not yet know how to pick out the relevant collective variables (the wings of Gertrude) as the variables that will matter to the unfolding of the biosphere. So we seem to confront a limitation on knowledge that we had not recognized before. The evolving biosphere is doing something cannot be foretold; we do not have the categories. The same, I think, applies to technological evolution: No one foresaw the Internet a century ago.

    Interestingly, the fact that we cannot prestate technological possibilities, if true, cuts the core out of the contemporary reigning theory in economics: “competitive general equilibrium,” which begins with the assumption that one can prestate all possible goods and services, then proves that markets clear – that is, all goods are sold to buyers at the contracted price. But we cannot state ahead of time all the possible good and services, so the reigning theory is wrong at the outset.

    Stuart Kauffman (2002). What is life? In J. Brockman (Ed.), The next fifty years, pp. 126-141. New York: Vintage

    Categories
    sheffield

    midland mainline complaints address

    [local news warning]

    You can wait on hold for 20 minutes to get this address to write your complaint letter to, like i did, or you can copy it down from here:

    Midland Mainline Customer Services
    Nelson Street
    Derby
    DE1 2SA

    Normally Midland Mainline are fantatic, it’s their internet sales support which i’m complaining about (and guess who that is run by? Virgin, of course)

    Categories
    quotes

    heart of darkness

    Once, I remember, we came upon a man-of-war anchored off the coast. There wasn’t even a shed there, and she was shelling the bush . . . In the empty immensity of earth, sky, and water, there she was, incomprehensible, firing into a continent. Pop, would go one of the six-inch guns; a small flame would dart and vanish, a little white smoke would disappear, a tiny projectile would give a feeble screech — and nothing happened. Nothing could happen. There was a touch of insanity in the proceeding, a sense of lugubrious drollery in the sight; and it was not dissipated by somebody on board assuring me earnestly there was a camp of natives — he called them enemies! — hidden out of sight somewhere.

    Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, 1902