Showing posts with label marketers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label marketers. Show all posts

Tuesday, December 24, 2013

Merry Christmas - Marketing, psychology and the world



Santa Claus, Christmas carols, gifts, endless queues at the malls and the local post offices, house decorations and more human externalities! Christmas is here! Hohoho!! But, what does Christmas mean for us? Why "Merry Christmas"? Does Santa really exist? How could Christmas decoration both in houses and in retail stores affect our psychology? Marketers and psychologists are actually curious human beings that have studied almost every aspect of human and consumer behavior, including Christmas psychology!

Santa Claus really exists?

Santa Claus, also known as Saint Nicholas, Father Christmas or simply "Santa", is a mythical figure with legendary, historical and folkloric origins who, in many Western cultures, is said to bring gifts to the homes of the good children on December 24, the night before Christmas. Images of Santa Claus were further popularized through Haddon Sundblom’s depiction of him for The Coca-Cola Company’s Christmas advertising in the 1930s. The popularity of the image spawned urban legends that Santa Claus was invented by The Coca-Cola Company or that Santa wears red and white because they are the colors used to promote the Coca-Cola brand. Historically, Coca-Cola was not the first soft drink company to utilize the modern image of Santa Claus in its advertising: White Rock Beverages had already used a red and white Santa to sell mineral water in 1915 and then in advertisements for its ginger ale in 1923.

Kids believe in Santa Claus as a function of age. Kids are also more likely to believe if their parents encourage them to do so [Anderson & Prentice, 1994]. But it’s not clear that these beliefs are a sign of greater gullibility or even a greater interest in fantasy.

Actually, researchers found that a belief in Santa was unrelated to other measures of a child's interest in fantasy [Prentice, 1978]. And a recent series of experiments conducted at Harvard found that kids make important distinctions between beliefs in folkloric, fantasy characters and beliefs in other unseen, but scientifically-established, entities. Kids who professed to believe in Santa were nonetheless less certain about it than they were about the existence of oxygen or germs. Another set of experiments revealed that 4-year old kids don't invoke magical explanations for things that happen in the real world-not unless those things otherwise seem impossible [Rosengren & Hickling, 1994].

What happens when kids finally penetrate the veil and reject our fantasies? We might feel a little awkward or wistful. But the kids don’t appear to be heartbroken. When researchers questioned children who had stopped believing in Santa Claus, a milestone they reached around the age of 7, kids reported feeling pleased.

They had figured it out. They were enlightened now.

According to Anderson , it was THE PARENTS, NOT THE KIDS, who reported feeling a bit sad..

Why Merry Christmas?

Tim Kasser, an American psychologist, known for his work on materialism & Kennon Sheldon, professor of Psychological Sciences, University of Missouri, noticed 10 years ago that "More happiness was reported when family and religious experiences were especially salient, and lower well-being occurred when spending money and receiving gifts predominated. Engaging in environmentally conscious consumption practices also predicted a happier holiday, as did being older and male. In sum, the materialistic aspects of modern Christmas celebrations may undermine well-being, while family and spiritual activities may help people to feel more satisfied". Thus consumerism is not always the answer.



Christmas decoration


Werner & Brown [Journal of Environmental Psychology, 1989] suggested that most people like decorating their house for Christmas. One possible reason for this behavior could be the desire to communicate friendliness and cohesiveness with neighbors. Stimulus homes had been preselected to represent the four cells of a two by two factorial design crossing the presence/absence of Christmas decorations with the resident’s self-rated social contact with neighbors (low/high). As expected, a main effect for the decorated factor indicated that raters used Christmas decorations as a cue that the residents were friendly and cohesive. Decoration interacted with sociability in a complex but interpretable way. 

In the absence of Christmas decorations, raters accurately distinguished between the homes of sociable and nonsocial residents; in open ended comments, they attributed their impressions to the relatively more ‘open’ and ‘lived in’ look of the sociable residents’ homes. When Christmas decorations were present, raters actually attributed greater sociability to the nonsocial residents, citing a more open appearance as the basis for their judgments. The results support the idea that residents can use their home’s exterior to communicate attachment and possibly to integrate themselves into a neighborhood’s social activities.

As regards retail stores and their Christmas decoration, the following video, that explores current neuromarketing methods (measuring stimuli and emotions to retail stores Christmas decoration), might shed light on unconscious consumer decision-making processes:






Thursday, July 25, 2013

Neuromarketing research for the win - pt1

Marketing research methods continuously develop and over the last decade technology offered solutions to improve this area. Traditional marketing research methods fail at some point in certain cases, and since emotions are mediators of how consumers process marketing messages, understanding of cognitive responses to advertisements have always been a challenge in methodology. Neuromarketing is the branch of neuroscience research that aims to better understand the consumer through his unconscious processes and has application in marketing, explaining consumer's preferences, motivations and expectations, predicting his behavior and evaluating successes or failures of advertising messages.

Neuroscience


Neuroscience gathers information on the structure and functions of the brain and its sub-domain called cognitive neuroscience seeks to understand the neural mechanisms behind thoughts, reasoning, emotions, memory or decision making. Using technology advances in neuroscience, researchers can obtain information on brain responses to marketing stimuli, not having full confidence in what they report. They provide new ways for understanding how consumers store, retrieve, develop and use information. Neuromarketing is an emerging interdisciplinary field that aims to investigate and understand consumer behavior by studying the brain. Thus, using neuroimaging techniques, researchers measure subjects' responses to marketing stimuli. Therefore, the development of this field depends on the advance of science, technology and computer science.



Neuroimaging tools


Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) represents an appropriate methodology for uncovering the areas of the brain activation in response to a very simple experimental design with little potential for the temporal dimension to be a problem. fMRI combines magnetic field and radio waves, producing a signal that allows viewing brain structures in detail and following the metabolic activity in the brain. Τhe subject lies on a bed, with the head surrounded by a large magnet which causes the atom particles (protons) inside the subject's head to align with the magnetic field. As blood contains iron, the iron atoms that are not bound to oxygen produce small distortions in the nearer magnetic field and when a certain brain area is active, corresponding blood vessels dilate and more blood rushes in, reducing the amount of oxygen-fee hemoglobin and producing a change in the magnetic field in the active area.




Software allows viewing this change, displaying colored areas overlapping the grey-scale image of the brain and refreshing the image every 2 to 5 seconds. fMRI allows measuring brain activity and searching for patterns while subjects perform certain tasks or experience marketing stimuli. Data analysis can be conducted using specific software packages, as BrainVoyager QX or Statistical parametric Mapping (SPM5).

Electroencephalography (EEG) is one of the most used tools in neuromarketing research, after fMRI. The amplitudes of the recorded brain waves correspond to certain mental states, such as wakefulness (beta waves), relaxation (alpha waves), calmness (theta waves) and sleep (delta waves). A number of electrodes (up to 256) are placed on the scalp of the subjects, in certain areas, in order to measure and record the electricity for that certain spot. Technology allows EEG to be a portable device and record brain activity in any many circumstances, as for example in supermarkets. Also, EEG is able to record only activity data from superficial layers of the cortex.

Positron emission tomography (PET) is another expensive method to use that can obtain physiologic images with spatial resolution similar to fMRI by recording the radiation from the emission of positrons from the radioactive substance administered to the subject. A battery of detectors surrounds the subject's head and traces radiation pulse, without precisely identify the location of the signal. Technical issues involve obtaining the radioactive material and it's short life.

Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) uses magnetic induction in order to modulate the activity of certain brain areas that are located 1-2 centimeters inside, without reaching the neocortex. New TMS technology allows also targeting lower brain areas and is less expensive than PET or fMRI scanners. A plastic case containing an electric coil is positioned near to the subject's head. TMS discharges a magnetic field that passes through the brain, allowing making changes in the brain tissue in certain locations and being able either to temporary activate neurons (using high frequency) or temporary disable neuronal activity (low frequency). TMS is able to highlight causal inferences by analyzing the subject in front of a marketing stimuli while certain brain areas are disabled, stimulated, or normal.







Neuromarketing methodology

Eye Tracking allows studying behavior and cognition without measuring brain activity, but where the subject is looking at, for how long he is looking, the path of the subject's view and changes in pupil dilation while the subjects looks at stimuli. Eye tracking allows measuring the attention focus and thus monitoring types of behavior. Eye movements fall into two categories: fixations and saccades. Fixation is when the eye movement pauses in a certain position and saccade is a switch to another position. The resulting series of fixations and saccades is called a scan path, and they are used in analyzing visual perception, cognitive intent, interest and salience. Eye tracking provides more accurate information than self-report, as research shows that claimed viewing is not always the same as measured actual viewing.



Measuring Physiological Responses to stimuli can provide information on the subject's emotional effects by monitoring the heart rate, blood pressure, skin conductivity (affected by sweat, measuring arousal level), stress hormone from saliva, facial muscles contractions, and inferring the emotional state for each moment. [Bercea,2013]

Response time measures computes the amount of time between stimuli appearance and it's response, informing researchers on the complexity of the stimulus to an individual and how the subject relates to it. This cheap method can be used on recall studies or on measuring subject's attitude towards certain stimuli.







                                                      To be continued...

Friday, July 19, 2013

Marketing & Social Psychology for a Better Future



Because Marketing is interested in persuasion, changing attitudes and provoking specific behaviours, it has always used psychological theories, and more specifically theories coming from Social Psychology. As early as 1928, the famous work of Edward Bernays on Propaganda, one of the many ancestors of marketing and Freud's nephew,explicitly refers to several social psychologist’s work in order to address and influence the masses to sell them products, for example by manipulating the nature of the source of information to for better influence in claims.

Apart from theories and experiments, Social Psychology also brought many a technique which is now used in Marketing, especially in the consumer research side: to name the most prominent, in-depth interviews, focus groups, attitude scales, laboratory experiments on choices.


Human behavior and the installation of the world


The determinants of human behavior are distributed: Some lay in the subject (motives, goals,preferences, habits), others lay in the context (artefacts, rules, other people). In an operational perspective, for practitioners who want to understand, predict or influence human behavior at a given moment, and a given place, the world can be considered as an installation.Installation must be understood here in the artistic sense of assembling patterns in space to modify the way we experience this situation. The installation of the world guides subjects into their activity track, at three levels: physical,psychological, social. It is possible to frame this installation in order to influence behavior. Let us detail these three levels.


The physical level refers to material reality and artefacts. It provides affordances for activity (which can be supported by the objects). For example, chairs afford sitting; buses afford transportation; on-line support affords help. One can only do what is afforded by the present environment. This layer of installation is distributed in the physical environment by construction of infrastructure, and various mechanisms of supply and procurement.






This first, physical, level of determination affords a tree of possibilities; but not everything that is possible will be realized. This is where psychology comes into play. To take action,subects must interpret situations. Objects evoke for humans specific connotations of activity, and operative images. At psychological level, motives,representations and practice provide possible interpretations of the situation by the subject.For example choosing between various artefacts (e.g. different brands of same product) which all provide some affordance for the desired activity. Representations include the “how to use” the objects; for example a web browser, a car, or a self-service restaurant. Representations also enable subjects to elaborate and plan behaviors  This layer of installation is distributed over individual humans, by the means of physiology, experience, education and exposures to discourse (media, advertising, etc).

But again, not everything that is even both possible and desired will be realized: a third level of determination, social, will cut off more branches from the tree of possibilities. For example, although we could drive on any side of the roads, only one is allowed in every country. Because individual actions produce externalities, they are limited by others. Institutions are a social solution to control potential abuse or misuse, and minimize social costs also called “negative externalities”. Institutions set common conventions which enable cooperation (e.g. people should all drive on the same side of the road; etc). Many of the rules are already contained in the normative aspects of representations, but institutions are special in their capacity to enforce behavior  by social pressure or more direct means.


So, at a given moment, individual behavior is determined by this distributed installation: Artefacts installed in the physical environment, interpretive systems installed in humans, and institutions installed in society. This enables us to understand better the role of Psychology in this framework. Because some determinants lay in the context, psychological theories alone cannot explain or predict behavior but because some determinants are psychological and social, a social psychological approach is necessary.


Installation theory is of course very schematic. Still, it enables a first orientation in the complex socio-technical systems which innovators must deal with; it provides a check-list for analysis and agenda for action. If we want to change the World, or more modestly one of its subdomains, it is clear that no action limited to a single layer of determination -for example a new product, or a campaign- will be enough to change the behaviors of people. We should make sure that appropriate installation in the three layers (physical environment, individuals concerned, relevant institutions) has been addressed. What is left to us is the strategy of how to create and distribute such installation.



Towards a more sustainable future



In this global change management, as said earlier, Marketing plays a key role. Marketing has been in charge of implementing change for most built environment and policies, in a market context. But now, precisely, we have become aware of the limitations of the market system.Now, we face a new challenge with global sustainability, of which the current financial crisis is only one of the first global symptoms, together with climate change and ecological destruction.Too often in the past, Marketing has been on the dark side of the force, mobilizing considerable resources only to move the frontiers between brand territories, in a zero-sum game. In doing so, though, a considerable amount of knowledge and agency has been accumulated. Now, marketers, the World needs your capacities to help degrowth. We have collectively failed in creating a sustainable civilization, and there is little time left to change it into a better system.

Social value is the resource. An observation of what does actually work in terms of sustainable consumption.In the end, what Humans look for is belong to a group where they are recognized, have status, and gain other’s people’s love. And for this they are ready to give, not only take. In fact, most consumption has this final use of building someone’s position in groups. When people buy fancy cars, display brands on their clothes, and in general work or spend their money and time, it is usually for that purpose of gaining or keeping position in a group.


This is probably the way into which Marketing should engage in this 21st century. After the markets of goods and services, it is the markets of sociability which will be the next frontier. Many of us have already recognized the social realm as a major source of value, and as said earlier there are numerous attempts to use it, but until now it has been mostly mobilized so serve the old regime of brands. It should now serve society itself, or there will be no 22nd century for the civilization we have built. But make no mistake: when I talk about a “market of sociability”, this means not that we should commoditize and sell sociability, as has unfortunately been often the temptation lately. I mean, on the contrary, that sociability is a kind of “money”, a psychological reward system for performing other activities. Building markets with this new currency is certainly a challenge for Marketing [Professor Saadi Lahlou,LSE,2009].


I strongly recommend the following lesson @Coursera for young marketers with no previous background on Social Psychology (www.coursera.org/course/socialpsychology), as well as The Social Animal,a must-read written by Elliot Aronson .