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Ads work by cultural imprinting, not emotional inception

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Re: Ads work by cultural imprinting, not emotional inception

#71

Post by gcb4 »

tomaskafka wrote: post #69
estefan wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure what the article says isn't incompatible with Cialdini's Influence at all. IIRC he also says that the more publicly an individual takes a position, the more they feel the need to remain congruent with that position in future. When people decide they want to be seen as a certain kind of person, they want to remain consistent with that. That's why if you want to reach a goal, you should tell as many of…

> That sounds like if I was bombarded of pictures of people smiling drinking coke I might forget that it tastes like crap and want to drink it. It certainly seems that you have made your opinion on coke, and that it's a strong one. Pictures of smiling people won't obviously overturn that, they don't have that large power, but in this case, you are not a target group. However, imo majority of people don't have that st…

his point is mostly that just by living around people influenced by those ads you have to assimilate the meaning if only for communication, even if you're not affected/not part of the target demographic

Re: Ads work by cultural imprinting, not emotional inception

#72

Post by lotsofmangos »

philh wrote: post #62
DanBC wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If 4/5 dentists (with no financial motivations) were asked "is there one brand of toothpaste in particular that you recommend?" and answered "toothident", then that would be a sensible reason to use toothident. No! Just because they think it works doesn't mean it does work. Toothident might be the first toothpaste that comes to mind but that doesn't mean it's better than any other toothpaste - and it might be worse…

Yes, those things might be true. But I don't know anything about the pens and sticky fixit pads of the different toothpaste companies, and I have no reason to expect it correlates (in either direction) with toothpaste quality, so knowing this shouldn't change my decision. It should make me less confident in my decision, but not change it. Toothident is more likely to be recommended by 4/5 dentists in a world where it…

Toothident is more likely to be recommended by 4/5 dentists if it is much better known than the best toothpaste, and advertising achieves that.

Edit- Also dentists are not necessarily particularly rational. I know a dentist who told me that she rejects evidence based medicine and thinks that we should use traditional Chinese medicine instead. She isn't Chinese, she is a British middle-class hippy and when I asked her about the effect on rare species, she said that rare species are never used in Chinese medicine. I then asked her if she supports evidence based medicine when her patients are anesthetized, or does she think the dosage should be guessed and she said she didn't know what that had to do with it. Also, 5 is a tiny sample. From a sample of 5 dentists, 4 might tell you that the second coming of Christ is imminent, but that would tell you very little about either Christ's travel plans, or the opinions of dentists.

Re: Ads work by cultural imprinting, not emotional inception

#73

Post by duncanawoods »

jessriedel wrote: post #36
GuiA wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It looks like the author of this is just some random engineer without a lot of backround in marketing or persuasion psychology. That's a shame because he's clearly interested in it. Little parenthesis: if you're interested in a subject, make the effort to read about it from well established sources (very often, books). The author of the posted article relies on sources like LifeHacker and pop psychology journalism…

That sounds nice, but in practice it's extremely difficult because academics have very little incentive to make their rigorous research discoverable, much less accessible, to laymen. I agree that arm-chair theorizing is almost always a waste of time, but a layman probably contributes more by trying to bring his own particular expertise (software engineering or whatever) to bear on the problem -- on the off chance tha…

I find introductory textbooks created for those who study the subject at college / university a nice middle ground.

They are not always cheap or in ebook form so libraries are useful. They require more effort to read than popsci books but you learn so much more and they are considerably easier to digest than academic papers.

Re: Ads work by cultural imprinting, not emotional inception

#74

Post by DanBC »

philh wrote: post #62
DanBC wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If 4/5 dentists (with no financial motivations) were asked "is there one brand of toothpaste in particular that you recommend?" and answered "toothident", then that would be a sensible reason to use toothident. No! Just because they think it works doesn't mean it does work. Toothident might be the first toothpaste that comes to mind but that doesn't mean it's better than any other toothpaste - and it might be worse…

Yes, those things might be true. But I don't know anything about the pens and sticky fixit pads of the different toothpaste companies, and I have no reason to expect it correlates (in either direction) with toothpaste quality, so knowing this shouldn't change my decision. It should make me less confident in my decision, but not change it. Toothident is more likely to be recommended by 4/5 dentists in a world where it…

> Toothident is more likely to be recommended by 4/5 dentists in a world where it is better than other toothpastes, than in a world where it is worse.

This is false and it is dangerous.

Dentists are not experts in toothpaste; they're not experts in the latest toothpaste research.

A dentist recommending toothident will probably have no idea about whether toothident is better or worse than some other toothpaste.

For a real world example of this see knee arthroscopy for rheumatoid arthritis. Doctors would recommend this surgery over other treatments until placebo[1] controlled trials found little benefit.

"X out of Y experts recommend $THING" would be a terrible reason to chose $THING over $OTHERTHING unless you have imformation about why they recommend it and how they made that decision.

Re: Ads work by cultural imprinting, not emotional inception

#75

Post by hownottowrite »

The Ehrenberg Bass Institute has quantitative marketing/advertising/brand results going back to the 50s. If you're interested in the math, I recommend checking out How Brands Grow by EBI director, Byron Sharp.

[1] http://www.marketingscience.info

[2] http://www.amazon.com/How-Brands-Grow-What-Marketers/dp/0195...

Re: Ads work by cultural imprinting, not emotional inception

#76

Post by jonahx »

comex wrote: post #6

Maybe I'm just less aware of what other people do than others, but I find this fundamentally unconvincing (the argument that this explains most of what's usually considered emotional inception, not the existence of the phenomenon in some cases). > Beer, soft drinks, gum, every kind of food (think backyard barbecues). Restaurants, coffee shops, airlines. Cars, computers, clothing. Music, movies, and TV shows (think ab…

> Nobody notices what brand of sneakers you're wearing... at least, I rarely even look down that far, and I can't believe other people are that different.

Believe it. Many are.

Re: Ads work by cultural imprinting, not emotional inception

#77

Post by coldcode »

gabemart wrote: post #37
tedks wrote: post #16

Oh man. That's a doozy. Well, uh. >We may not conform to a model of perfect economic behavior, but neither are we puppets at the mercy of every Tom, Dick, and Harry with a billboard. We aren't that easily manipulated. Yeah. Yeah we are. It looks like the author of this is just some random engineer without a lot of backround in marketing or persuasion psychology. That's a shame because he's clearly interested in it an…

> sorry, saying 4/5 doctors recommend X is not a rational cue to buy X If we assume for a moment that 4/5 doctors really do recommend X, and that X is something related to one's health, why is it not a rational cue to buy X?

The ads never mention that they actual asked 100 dentists, found 4 who recommended it, added one of the non recommending ones to make it seem less cheesy, resulting in 4 out of 5 that we picked recommending our product. There is no law requiring a mention of the other 95 opinions.

Re: Ads work by cultural imprinting, not emotional inception

#78

Post by estefan »

ncavet wrote: post #22

Complete nonsense. Do you really believe that comms majors are being tought cultural inception in undergrad? The Corona ad, like all ads, is a response ne to a brief that is designed to address a business objective. In this case get people to drink Corona not just in the Summer. Hence find your own beach even if you live in Minnesota in the Winter and would normally reach for a winter beer. We don't sit around at age…

How they're made doesn't explain why they work or not. But having said that if that ad was run in the winter it could be interpreted in a very different way to if it was a summer campaign.

Re: Ads work by cultural imprinting, not emotional inception

#79

Post by philh »

DanBC wrote: post #74
philh wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, those things might be true. But I don't know anything about the pens and sticky fixit pads of the different toothpaste companies, and I have no reason to expect it correlates (in either direction) with toothpaste quality, so knowing this shouldn't change my decision. It should make me less confident in my decision, but not change it. Toothident is more likely to be recommended by 4/5 dentists in a world where it…

> Toothident is more likely to be recommended by 4/5 dentists in a world where it is better than other toothpastes, than in a world where it is worse. This is false and it is dangerous. Dentists are not experts in toothpaste; they're not experts in the latest toothpaste research. A dentist recommending toothident will probably have no idea about whether toothident is better or worse than some other toothpaste. For a…

My argument doesn't rely on dentists being experts on toothpaste. It relies on them knowing more than I do about toothpaste, on average.

I can think of plausible mechanisms that would discriminatingly push an unusually good toothpaste to the top of dentists' recommendations. Offhand, I can't think of any that would discriminatingly push an unusually bad toothpaste up there.

By "discriminatingly", I mean that e.g. advertising would work just as well for a good toothpaste as a bad one. But "the evidence suggests that this toothpaste is actually really good" is more likely to show up for a good toothpaste than a bad one. And I can't think of anything which is more likely to recommend a bad toothpaste than a good one.

So if I think there's a 90% chance that toothident is only recommended because of advertising, then I have no reason to think that toothident is particularly good or bad; but if there's a 10% chance that dentists do actually have a reason to recommend toothident, then I should use toothident, because I have no reason to favour anything else.

Certainly there are cases where this goes wrong, but I never claimed it was infallible.

Re: Ads work by cultural imprinting, not emotional inception

#80

Post by cauterized »

comex wrote: post #6

Maybe I'm just less aware of what other people do than others, but I find this fundamentally unconvincing (the argument that this explains most of what's usually considered emotional inception, not the existence of the phenomenon in some cases). > Beer, soft drinks, gum, every kind of food (think backyard barbecues). Restaurants, coffee shops, airlines. Cars, computers, clothing. Music, movies, and TV shows (think ab…

Perhaps cultural imprinting is as much about reinforcing our self-image as it is about impressing our peers?
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