Derren Brown is a British “mentalist” and entertainer. He has a number of fascinating videos over on You Tube, including this classic – quite simply, the most persuasive illustration of nonconscious processing I have ever seen. When you click on the video below, you may have to follow the link over to You Tube to [...]
A really fascinating, and in several ways disturbing study crossed my desk a couple of weeks ago. Authored by Jennifer Harris, the legendary John Bargh, and Kelly Brownwell, the article is called “Priming Effects of Television Food Advertising on Eating Behavior”. It was published earlier this this year in Health Psychology. Abstract and [...]
A clever series of experiments is reported in the Journal of Consumer Research dealing with how people respond to advertising in context. Researchers Hao Shen, Yuwei Jiang, and Rashmi Adaval had people read pages from a mock magazine that contained articles (movie reviews for a film festival) and an ad (for a watch). Participants were [...]
I admit it, I’m a sucker for any argument that turns an established paradigm on its head. It’s hard to beat that little thrill you get when you realize everything we thought we knew may be wrong!
My favorite iconoclast in the advertising research world is Robert Heath, a former ad man turned academic whose home [...]
I’ve written elsewhere on this blog about the influence of Vance Packard’s 1957 book, The Hidden Persuaders, on journalistic accounts and public perceptions of the new “neuromarketing” field.
In 2007 there were a number of reviews and appreciations of The Hidden Persuaders written to commemorate the 50th anniversary of its publication. I just finished reading a [...]
In a recent post haranguing against the term “neuromarketing”, I referenced Mya Frazier’s front-page piece in Advertising Age back in September 2007, “Hidden Persuasion or Junk Science?“. As noted in that post, the neuromarketers she portrayed went more than a little overboard in their efforts to extol the virtues and magic of their techniques, and [...]
A simplistic approach to advertising effectiveness tries to draw a straight line from an ad’s internal characteristics – its creativity, catchiness, product depiction, value proposition, memorable characters, etc. – to a product’s success in the marketplace.
Some neuromarketers try to exploit this simple view by claiming that their testing can identify “winning” ads that will directly [...]
Professor Marc Blitz has posted a lengthy but very thought-provoking article over at Neuroethics & Law Blog about whether the First Amendment should protect “subliminal messaging”. He does not come to any hard and fast conclusions, but in good lawyerly fashion examines various arguments for and against the influence of deliberate and inadvertent subliminal stimuli, [...]
“What we didn’t get was the passion this very loyal small group of consumers have. That wasn’t something that came out in the research.” – Neil Campbell,President of Tropicana North America
If anyone thinks they don’t need to be very careful about packaging change research, PepsiCo’s Tropicana brand provides a scary cautionary tale.
In early January, Tropicana [...]