How To Be A Good Advertising Professional

DigiCynic or Jerome Courtial is now a planner with WK Amsterdam. Recently he wrote a long post on what he thinks is needed to be successful advertising professional. His 12 point road map. Be curious, have integrity, become a good diplomat, love your job, be nice to people and meet a lot of them, be confident, become an expert, look for new creative opportunities, learn to collaborate, understand human nature, be a better presenter, and harness the power of stories. We couldn’t agree more. Read more.

Brands in the brain. The truth, like you never expected.

In an effort to reduce spillage in men’s urinals, authorities at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam have etched the image of a black housefly into each urinal. It seems that men usually do not pay much attention to where they aim, which can create a bit of a mess. But if you give them a target, they can’t help but try to hit it. Did it work? Since the bugs were etched into the airport urinals, spillage has decreased by 80 percent.

Admen have known this to be true. That human beings are nudgeable. This is why Apple users happily pay hundreds of dollars more for a computer that does pretty much exactly the same things that a Dell computer does. Despite knowing that our outlook on the world can be moulded by messages, subtle or harsh, no one can really tell us why such a thing really happens.

FutureLab points us to an experiment that Jim Edwards of Brandweek undertook to understand exactly how our brains work when it came to brands. He became a willing guinea pig and had his brain scanned by Joy Hirsch, director of the Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Center at Columbia University, while viewing brands he liked and disliked. While he writes mostly about his personal experience, some of the results are exactly opposite of what most marketers and planners have believed.

The most striking parts of Jim Edward’s experience: My brain processed high-value brands on its left side, handling the low-value ones on the right. That’s not what one would expect, since the so-called left-brain is traditionally associated with conceptual processing and the right with emotions.

In my case, the high-value brands activated three areas: my left angular gyrus, left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and my left orbitofrontal gyrus. Those systems are associated with the extraction of meaning, conceptual organization and reward respectively. “I haven’t seen that before,” Hirsch said. “My curiosity is piqued by that.”

Mine, too. When it came to brands I dislike, I apparently really disliked them. My right insula – an internal fold just over an inch in length – is lit up like a runway. “Now, your brain isn’t that big, but it’s devoted on your right side to something where you’re saying, ‘That’s a low-value item for me,’” Hirsch explained. Worse, the insula is understood to handle feelings of disgust. “That is not a result to be trifled with,” Hirsch said.

And that’s the big surprise: These results are the exact opposite of the received marketing wisdom. I’m not, apparently, emotional about brands I like. Instead, my brain behaves like an antiques dealer sifting an estate sale for high-priced items. My emotional feelings – specifically disgust – are reserved for the brands I dislike. And I don’t merely ignore those brands like clutter; I process them through the area of my brain that helps me avoid rotten food and poisonous berries.

Read More in Good Magazine here. And in Brandweek, here.

Advertising Is Magic. Psychology Today

Psychology Today has an interesting story on the power of brands and advertising. Here it is in full.

In the June issue of Psychology Today, we covered a paper from the Journal of Consumer Research demonstrating how the display of brands automatically affects our behavior. In the studies, exposure to the Apple logo made people more creative than exposure to an IBM logo, and the Disney logo made people more honest than the E! Entertainment logo.

In the sidebar to that story I joked about other ways to use logos in your life, including this one for increasing motivation: “Ugh, you’re slogging up to your fifth-floor walk-up after a long day. Just glance down at the North Face logo on your sleeve: “To the summit!” Turns out, my quip was more accurate than I knew. In the August issue of PT, I cover a paper to be published in Psychology of Sport and Exercise showing the effect of product placement on physical endurance. Only instead of North Face, it was Gatorade. When viewing the sports drink bottle (versus a water bottle), subjects construed their task as a positive challenge and held their leg in the air longer.

A study in the August issue of the Journal of Consumer Research by Tanya Chartrand et al, show further subconscious branding effects: fancy-pants brands induce big spending. Subjects saw the words “Tiffany”, “Neiman Marcus,” “Nordstrom,” “Wall-Mart,” “Kmart,” or “Dollar Store” flashed on a screen for 60 milliseconds. Those who saw the first three were more likely than those who saw the second three to prefer a $6 pair of Nike socks over a $5.25 double pack of Hanes socks and a $99 Sharp microwave over a $69 Haier microwave. So carrying a bag coated with that God-awful Louis Vitton pattern will endow you with an aura of prestige beyond any logical deduction process in your surveyors.

Logos can also work through channels of social cognition. As Davis writes, “Many consumers, especially young people, cling to logos like Timberland and Stussy as if they were clan totems” And Williams writes:

When a magical pattern has become established in a society, it is capable of some real if limited success. Many people will indeed look twice at you, upgrade you, upmarket you, respond to your displayed signals, if you have made the right purchases within a system of meanings to which you are all trained. Thus the fantasy seems to be validated…

So to some degree, there is no magical thinking in believing brands have real influence. It’s completely logical to recognize that brands accumulate collective associations. Still, consider two artists’ absurdist take on the ultimate power of labels, as documented by Rob Walker in his new book Buying In. A fashion label produced by a pair of guys known as Andrew Andrew was just that: a label. They set up a sewing machine in a storefront in SoHo and, according to one of the Andrews, “we would sew this oversized label onto your sweater, making your shirt part of our line.” The product is the same, before and after. The only difference is what it now signifies via its label and associations–a purely informational/metaphysical transformation. Walker summarizes: “People do not buy objects. They buy ideas about products.” To believe that your sweater is fundamentally different, an object changed by an idea about the object…doesn’t that smack of magical thinking?

In my article about magical thinking in the April issue of PT, I mention Piaget’s idea of nominal realism, the tendency to believe that names affect reality. As he wrote in his 1929 book The Child’s Conception of the World, “The name is therefore in the object, not as a label attached to it but as an invisible quality of the object.” And as psychologist Carl Johnson wrote in a 2000 book chapter subtitled “The Development of Metaphysical Thinking,” “In the absence of any obvious, overt connection between the word and the thing, the tendency is to assume that there must be some deeper, hidden connection.” The label is arbitrary. Its power is in its psychological, ethereal connections, not in any physical force. And yet it’s treated as though it has real influence in the world.

The most famous example of a brand’s influence may be the Pepsi Challenge. In taste tests, people prefer Pepsi over Coke, yet they still buy Coke more. And in a seminal neuromarketing study reported in Neuron in 2004 (pdf), neuroscientist Read Montague showed that when you tell people which brand of soft drink they’re sipping, their brain activation changes significantly. But that’s just the placebo effect, that’s not magical thinking, right? Well, as mentioned in my MT article, psychologist Paul Rozin has demonstrated nominal realism in adults by asking subjects to take two bottles of sugar water and label one “sucrose” and one “poison.” They weren’t so hot to drink the one labeled “poison,” despite realizing their irrationality, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Coke fans would be down on drinking their favorite soda from a Pepsi bottle, even in private.

Magical thinking is all about blurring the boundaries between mind and matter, treating internal associations as if they exist out there in the world. So if you have the mental link between the red and white label and pure yumminess, and you expect, even a little bit, beyond your best reasoning, for the link to translate so that a bottle label actually makes the contents yummy, you’ve got some magical beliefs going on there.

In his upcoming book Buyology, marketing expert Martin Lindstrom describes how strong brands exhibit 10 pillars of religion: Let’s take Apple as an example. [Disclosure: I’m an Apple shareholder.] A sense of belonging: I grew up geeking out at Mac user groups (MUGs.) A clear vision: “Think different.” Power over enemies: “The power to crush the other kids. “Sensory appeal: witness those elegant iPhones. Storytelling: Steve and Steve in a garage in Cali. Grandeur: visit their flagship retail store on Fifth Avenue. Evangelism: Mac fans are super fanatical. Symbols: the apple logo, see above. Mystery: Apple crucifies those responsible for leaks. Rituals: “One more thing…”. I should add that they also have a high priest.

Lindstrom’s formula seems a bit superficial to me, though, and doesn’t get to the heart of religion. Magical thought is really about the sacred–objects and symbols and actions distinct from others, by virtue of an essence that taps into unseen forces along the guidelines of human imagination and that can bring to bear psychic elements on physical situations. So if you believe, even subconsciously, that soda can take you to “The Coke Side of Life, or that wearing cologne from a bottle labeled Polo Sport will make you any sportier, or that an Apple tattoo, even when out of sight, can summon the creative inspiration of Jobs et al., you are under the spell of advertising.

Hocus Focus Groups

Focus group hypnosis is increasingly becoming a “secret weapon” for Fortune 500 companies and ad agencies. As Euro RSCG Worldwide, New York and Volvo did recently. In focus group after focus group, participants say the same thing. That Volvo equals safety. But in an experimental group, members were asked to test-drive the car. Immediately afterwards they were hypnotized and asked their true feelings about the brand. It wasn’t pretty: Many revealed that Volvo also equals being middle-aged. Read more from BrandWeek

Sadness And Money

We’ve all heard about retail therapy working wonderfully, especially for women. So this CNN report that talks about people spending much more on shopping when they are sad and self-absorbed should have actually come as no surprise. Researchers from 4 top US universities – Stanford, Pittsburgh, Carnegie Mellon and Harvard revealed that study participants who watched a video clip of a boy losing his mentor offered to pay nearly four times as much money to buy a water bottle than a group that watched an emotionally neutral clip, one of the Great Barrief Reef in Australia. However, Jennifer Lerner, a professor from Harvard claims that this is different than retail therapy mainly because this happens without awareness, whereas in the former people are deliberately trying to cheer themselves up by shopping. Read the full article here.

The thing with genius

Is creativity all about genius, or harnessing the collective skills of many seemingly ‘ordinary’ people. Malcolm Gladwell hypothesis. Russell Davies corroborates.

The Psychology Of Powerpoint

We seem to love psychology. After the psychology of banner advertising, the psychology of price, comes the psychology of Powerpoint. Presentation Zen writes about Stephen Kosslyn’s new book, Clear and to the point: 8 psychological principles for compelling Powerpoint Presentations. The book contains serious advice as it comes to you not from a casual observer of Powerpoint, but from a renowned cognitive neuroscientist from Harvard, who aligns his list of presentations and PowerPoint “do’s & don’ts” with sound psychological principles. As only a scientist can Kosslyn says that presentation success can be virtually defined by meeting these three goals: Connecting with your audience, directing and holding their attention and promoting and understanding memory. Garr Reynolds at Presentation Zen has a review of the book.

Busting Silos

Adage writes about a new initiative from the media handlers at Group M, working on the Ford account. In an effort to get people within different groups to collaborate and work together, the CEO of Group M, Phil Cowdell hired a behavioral psychologist. Mr. Cowdell had the onerous task of getting media, researchers and strategists from three of Ford’s agencies, JWT, Ogilvy (who work with MindShare) and Y&R (MediaEdge CIA) to work together. While in the past they would have worked independently, the new group had to bring together the talents of diverse groups for the benifit of their client Ford Motors. Mr. Cowdell didn’t break down those silos alone, he turned to Sharon Davis, president of Seda Consulting, who met Mr. Cowdell by chance on a plane to New York. Since her arrival, the behavioral psychologist has interacted with the management team and coached other smaller groups to help orient them to the new vision and how to best use their skills and talent. More from AdAge.

What Women Want

BusinessWeek magazine recently looked at romance related marketing and found it seriously out of sync with the women of today. The role of women in society, the magazine feels, is evolving: They’re now ambitious, equal contributors in areas guys used to dominate, including school, sports, work, and politics (Vote Hillary!) What do modern girls want? (The authors of the article are women.) We desire modern guys we can respect as equals. Guys are attracted to strong, intelligent, independent females who can hold their own. Similarly, a girl thinks a guy who’s willing to participate as an equal partner in classically female roles is a total catch. When the guy is willing to pitch in and contribute to maintaining a quality, supportive relationship—activities that used to be a ‘girl’s’ responsibility—it’s a complete turn-on. So what is it that 21st Century women really want from their men? Here are there pointers: Sexy in Communication. Sexy in Playtime Partnership. And women want their men to bring sexy into everyday domestic. To the article.

Height of Thinking

If the glass ceiling is the metaphor for stifling your career growth, a recent study at the University of Minnesota suggests that ceiling height could affect other areas of your work life, like problem-solving skills and behavior. According to scientists from University of Minnesota and as reported in Live Science, when people are in a room with a high ceiling, they activate the idea of freedom. In a low-ceilinged room, they activate more constrained, confined concepts. The study consisted of three tests ranging from anagram puzzles to product evaluation. In every tested situation, a 10-foot ceiling correlated with subject activity that the researchers interpreted as “freer, more abstract thinking,” whereas subjects in an 8-foot room were more likely to focus on specifics. Read more here.