At first glance, this might seem to be only a sensory rule. But ultimately, the goal of creating clues that are easily followed is an emotional issue involving comfort or a lack thereof. Here's why:
Sensory clues that are more readily grasped are more fun and make us feel better. In summary, complexity runs counter to the wisdom of evolution.
For instance, we see a bottle of Heinz ketchup, and it becomes both literally and figuratively comfort food. In an ever more fragmented world, it provides, on a functional level, simple information processing. At the same time, emotionally it constructs an internal signpost that takes us back to childhood. At ease, we don't feel a need to question or analyze--we already trust. Without needing to scrutinize it, we register the bottle's simple, classic label and race past any price point comparison to lock in the emotional connection we feel.
In contrast, clues that are physically obscure or blurry create the equivalent emotional reaction. Marketing that creates confusion in consumers is scary, uncomfortable, and quite simply dumb. As a species, we want to enter a situation and get a sense of the vista. A certain degree of intrigue or suspense is fine, but when there's too much subtlety and too high a degree of difficulty, our ability to form a judgment is hindered.
Whether we know it or not, we as consumers often walk around with a For Sale sign around our necks. We want to be lured. We're always looking for greater fulfillment, and a company's offer might be just the ticket. Emotions turn on because we process a sensory clue and the offer it illustrates is meaningful to us. In short, it's relevant to us.
Relevancy has to do with possibilities, the belief that whatever is now on the horizon can make a real difference in our lives. Consumers want to believe that the breakthrough beauty product will not only erase their wrinkles but make them more attractive and thereby give them a new social life.
Sparked by the chance of finding relevancy, our emotions intuitively gather more information than reason alone can provide. Rationally, the higher the cost of the product, the greater the need for utility, but on an emotional basis, relevancy often outstrips literal value and drives a different decision that feels right.
As consumers, we long for what will lift daily existence into another, higher, more enriched sphere. Such hope could perhaps be derided as fantasy or even merely as selfishness and self-indulgence, but to do so would be wrong. As evolutionary psychology reminds us, humans are driven to feel good about ourselves. Self-confidence is often inflated, but it's an evolutionary advantage to feel good because it instills in people a degree of vitality that in turn attracts allies and friends.
There are, however, two important corollaries to this rule. The first is that although a company must always sell hope, it may do so by peddling fear-- thereby reminding us of what we hope to avoid. The second corollary is that whereas a company must always sell hope, it must deliver on faithful security.
The truth is that nothing deceives more cruelly than false hope. The payback? Consumers will mercilessly punish a company if its marketing efforts make a promise on which the company underdelivers.
Trust is a critical element in business, but it's also incredibly fragile. It's difficult to gain and easy to lose. With trust, there is no slow demise--it crashes. As the case with Firestone involving the defective tires on SUVs proved, when a company loses consumer trust, a death spiral commences that no rational, utilitarian, product-oriented marketing campaign can hope to stop.
The reason that trust is so elusive is grounded in the fact that the whole company-consumer relationship lies beyond reason--it's deeper and more emotionally based. Why is trust so important to a company? Because if a company can embed its touch points with sensory clues that signal (but don't exaggeratedly scream) empathy, the company can come out ahead. Trust is important to consumers because we want to believe, want to belong, and want to feel intimately attached to what we perceive as an ally.
We guard against a fundamental lack of believability that our gut instincts tell us "smells" like danger, and we discount the value of anything we don't trust.
Consumers are not abstract thinkers, so a company must root its pitch in the senses. Have a focal point, and be easy to perceive. To survive the initial sensory screening--without which no memory is possible--a company is wise to adhere to the hierarchy of sensory intake whereby visual imagery and then the other four senses are likely to predominate over interest in the written word. In that way, a greater, deeper involvement with consumers becomes possible.
To avoid being forgettable, sensory clues can secure a more permanent status in our lives by one of two routes.
These clues must burn bright, and they must hit an emotional hot button. We're naturally most attuned to what's distinct, novel, and involves change while also being significant and relevant to us.
Second, companies must build a house instead of pitching a tent. In other words, a company can achieve mental stickiness by attaching clues to what is already part of our memories.
We favor coherence over arbitrariness, so whatever relates to something we already know means a company is halfway home with the consumer; repetition does the rest.
There are very few (if any) commercial rewards for trying to broaden the target audience's collective comfort zone beyond what is already known and familiar. The better route for a company is to entrench its offer in something that is already recognizable to that audience. Deep down, go with the known sensory clues and the fundamental patterns of life that evolutionary psychology helps illuminate. Then, closer to the surface, add in the local, customized accent points that function like spices for a meal.
The truth is that the range of what is acceptable to people is small. As consumers, we're most likely to relate to what we know best. We draw us/them dichotomies all the time, for better or for worse. For marketers, it's essential to appeal to consumers' sense of what's familiar.
Familiarity breeds comfort, and everyone wants to be comfortable. Thus, it's far easier to gain buy-in by never selling us something new or strange ("foreign") until and unless it's first been wrapped in the familiar.
Once the threat of the new is removed, a company can then in effect sell consumers ourselves instead. By this I mean that a company can get us to buy products and concepts already known and accepted by us. The problem with foreign news is that we often don't have a mental map for it; we tend to dismiss it because it's not our country. Foreign news has nothing to resonate with, in contrast to local news that easily triggers the mental imagery locked in memory.
As consumers, our sensory experiences or take-away impressions of an offer set the stage for whether we will purchase or not. However, most companies aren't thorough and systematic in their approach to leveraging the sensory bandwidth.
There are three factors that influence the perceptual process: the perceiver, the setting, and the perceived.11 A company must pay close attention to all three if it hopes to make a connection. Consumers are the complex perceivers, often in three mental time zones at once: yesterday's sensory memories, today's split-second assigning of value based on experiences, and tomorrow's projected hopes or fears. Marketing gains in power to the extent that it can utilize all three time zones.
The second factor, the setting, should be studied because the signal-to-noise ratio or clutter of the setting in which the clues are encountered will influence their effectiveness. Finally, the third factor, the perceived, involves the specific clues that benefit from good design work that skillfully weaves together characteristics like contrast, intensity, size, and motion.
As a well-managed unit, perceiver, setting, and the perceived enable a company to create a strong intuitive connection with consumers that a consciously derived, rational response can't possibly hope to match.
Charles Darwin himself studied faces across cultures and wrote about the universality of human emotion. Part of the explanation for why faces are so powerful to humans is without doubt pure aesthetics. A pretty or handsome face is enjoyable to observe. But there are also other reasons why the face engages us so much as a species, and why marketing should in turn include the use of faces whenever feasible.
Other reasons for the power of faces include the following.
Faces command notice because they're the place of four of our major sensory inputs: eyes, ears, nose, and mouth. A second consideration is that the face is an easy, immediate barometer by which to gauge health and vitality. Finally, we focus on faces because they're full of emotion, which is valuable information for anyone trying to read another person.
Companies need to keep in mind that showing close-ups of faces offers a great opportunity to break through the clutter because people relate to other people. Faces grab and retain our attention. In the faces of a company's models and those of the service personnel and our fellow shoppers, we look to see if they seem truly happy and if they are somebody with whom we can identify. A company should always remember that to lose face isn't just about humiliation. It's about robbing an offer of intimacy and losing the chance to differentiate a product by creating a powerful sensory-emotive connection.
There are three steps in the consumer decision-making process: sensory impressions, emotional assessment, and a rational confirmation. Where does price fit into the picture? As a sensory clue, a posted price in a store or print ad is an impersonal abstraction. When marketing leads with price, this indirect contact has a negative effect on how deeply the emotional assessment engages us as consumers.
Price is not in any psychological list of basic human needs. Worthis, but that's a translation that gains its power and relevance once we've actually experienced the offer. Not surprisingly, then, price lacks in either sensory or emotive linkage.
It's not that price-based marketing doesn't feel right. It just doesn't resonate at all. What leading with price does is to tell consumers to look around and compare because price is important. It turns the sale into a commodity or simply a transaction. To encourage consumers to make the purchase on a cognitive, learning-brain level means losing the opportunity for the initial emotional connection. You can take consumers from the emotive to the cognitive. But you can't fully take them from cognitive to emotive. What's lost is the chance to drive past price to a more lucrative impulse purchase and the potential to forge a lasting bond with consumers that will bring them back for more.
This joker's wild: In marketing as in life in general, sex and humor are risky cards to play. The power of sex can't be denied--nothing else works better in terms of grabbing our attention immediately, and when it relates to the offer (as is the case with something like suntan lotion), at least the signals are swimming the same way.
Although the use of sex, bawdy humor, or anything that creates a strong sensation increases arousal, what happens in terms of emotional acceptance? Scientific studies show that on average men react to positive stimuli with both arousal and appeal, but with no arousal and a negative appeal reaction to negative stimuli. Women are the opposite in terms of how arousal works. Positive stimuli are well liked but may not engage them much. Negative stimuli create a strong negative reaction all around.12 The implications for marketing, especially if led by men, is the following.
A company can get hurt because it unintentionally offends or alienates some consumers--most likely women--by using visual or other content that men find adventuresome and women find dangerous or offensive and therefore unwelcome.
Now that I've run through some ground rules for marketing with sensory logic, in Chapter 3 I turn to marketing applications for marketers within different medium.
1. Paul Jacobs and Aaron Zitner, "Scientists Reach Milestone in Mapping of Human Genome," Los Angeles Times, June 27, 2000, p. A1.
2. Philip Kotler, Marketing Management: Analysis, Planning, Implementation, and Control, 8th ed. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1994), 193-198.
3. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 4.
4. Anthony Damasio, Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain(New York: Avon Books, 1995), 248.
5. "Light Up Your Dealerships! New Illuminated Sign Increases Rentals," U-Haul News,May 2000, p. 13.
6. Diane Ackerman, A Natural History of the Senses(New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 20.
