Ever wondered why some advertisements fail to hit the mark? It's time to debunk the myths and misconceptions surrounding the effectiveness of ads. Let's delve into the intricate world of advertising and explore how ads truly work.
How Advertising Works
Rather than attempting to persuade us (via our rational, analytical minds), ads prey on our emotions
- They work by creating positive associations between the advertised product and feelings like love, happiness, safety, and sexual confidence
- These associations grow and deepen over time, making us feel favorably disposed toward the product and, ultimately, more likely to buy it
- Here we have a theory – a proposed mechanism – of how ads influence consumer behavior
- Let’s call it emotional inception or just inception, coined after the movie of the same name where specialists try to implant ideas in other people’s minds, subconsciously, by manipulating their dreams. In the case of advertising, however, dreams aren’t the inception vector, but rather ideas and images, especially ones which convey potent emotions.
- This meme or theory about how ads work – by emotional inception – has become so ingrained, at least in my own model of the world, that it was something I always just took on faith, without ever really thinking about it. It suggests that human preferences can be changed with nothing more than a few arbitrary images.
Absence of Personal Advertising
If ads work by inception, then we should be able to advertise to ourselves just as effectively as companies advertise to us.
- We could use this to fix all those defects in our characters that we find so frustrating.
- If inception is as effective as advertising commentators make it out to be, we’d expect to see a lot more personal marketing than we actually observe.
How do they work?
Emotional inception is one (proposed) mechanism, but in fact there are many such mechanisms.
- A typical ad will employ a few different techniques at once – most of which are far more straightforward and above-board than emotional inception
- Most of ads work simply by raising awareness
- Almost every ad works, at least in part, by informing or reminding customers about a product
- Occasionally an ad will attempt overt persuasion, i.e., making an argument
- Perhaps the most important mechanism used by ads (across the ages) is making promises
- Honest signaling
- An ad conveys valuable information simply by existing – or more specifically, by existing in a very expensive location
Product Types
If brand advertising works by emotional inception, brands should advertise themselves roughly in proportion to the size of the market for their products.
- On the other hand, if branding works by cultural imprinting, we should expect brands to advertise themselves in proportion both to the market size and to the conspicuousness of product usage.
Underhanded Advertising
The goal is to seed us (viewers, consumers) with good memories, so that later, when shuffling down the beer aisle and spotting the Corona box, we’ll get the inexplicable warm fuzzies, and then: purchase!
- This ad looks like a textbook case of emotional inception, i.e., creating an arbitrary, Pavlovian association between Corona and the idea of relaxation.
- Something else is going on; some other mechanism is at play
- Let’s call this alternate mechanism cultural imprinting
- An ad campaign seeds everyone with a basic image or message, then it simply steps back and waits for its emotional message to take root and grow within your brain, but rather for your social instincts to take over, and for you to decide to use the product
Why aren’t brands two-faced?
The inception model predicts that brands should advertise to each audience separately, using whatever message is most likely to resonate with each audience
- Instead, brands carve out a relatively narrow slice of brand-identity space and occupy it for decades
- Brands need to be relatively stable and put on a consistent “face” because they’re used by consumers to send social messages
No Immunity
The problem with the inception model is that it fuels a hope that we could be immune to ads. If only we had a stronger psychological “immune system,” ads wouldn’t be able to get in – even by the emotional backchannel.
- Ads get us to buy things not in spite of our rationality, but because of it. Ads target us not as **** sapiens, full of idiosyncratic quirks, but as utility-maximizing **** economicus.
Ad examples
Nike ad
- The emotional inception story goes like this: The above ad creates an association between the Nike brand and the idea of athletic excellence.
- Over time and with enough exposure, the customer will internalize this association and begin to value the brand and products.
- Later, when the customer is shopping for shoes, his brain will use this information to predict what his peers will think of him if he shows up on the court wearing Nike shoes (vs. wearing some other brand).
Conspicuity
The key differentiating factor between adaptation and imprinting is how conspicuous the ad needs to be
- Insofar as an ad works by inception, its effect takes place entirely between the ad and an individual viewer; the ad doesn’t need to be conspicuous at all.
- On the other hand, for an ad to work by cultural imprinting, it needs to place in a conspicuous location, where viewers will see it and know that others are seeing it too.
