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Connecting the Dots
Running head: CONNECTING THE DOTS: A PRACTICAL OVERVIEW
Connecting the Dots: A Practical Overview of How Psychology & Neuroscience can
Influence Ad Effectiveness
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Abstract
This paper is intended to synthesize three areas of neuroscience and psychology that can
directly influence the effectiveness of ad design. Specifically, the author sought to
connect the areas of perception, emotion and memory and to show the roles they play in
effective ad design. Each of these areas has been widely studied but are typically
exclusive in their presentation. This paper makes the connection between all three and
addresses their interrelation and cumulative effect, which is intended to augment the
artistic process. Furthermore, the paper is written from the perspective of the garden
variety marketer who operates outside of the Fortune 500.
INTRODUCTION:
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the
age of foolishness…..” was written by Charles Dickens (1982) over 150 years ago about
the plight of the French peasantry under the demoralizing rule of the French aristocracy
in the years leading up to the French Revolution. In the early years of the revolution, the
tables were turned as the revolutionaries brutalized the aristocracy. We can see some
modest parallels within our industry as the once powerful print medium paid little
homage to the budding online channel. Some say that the print execs were just as
arrogant and oblivious as the French aristocracy and never saw the revolution coming.
Now, a shell of its former self, print struggles to survive. Our industry is truly seeing the
best of times and the worst of times. Print will not die, but will eventually be reborn as a
whole new manifestation. Online, while growing exponentially, is enjoying its time in
the spotlight with seemingly no end in sight. Our challenge then, is to continue to adapt
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to not only the changing forms of advertising, but also the changing science that leads us
to better ways of getting our message to our consumers.
At the very heart of advertising is the goal of trying to motivate a purchase behavior.
Any CFO would love to be able to objectively demonstrate ROI by being able to tie a
given ad exposure directly to a purchase. That would make life much easier for
advertising execs and justification of more advertising dollars almost moot. But as we all
know, that is not how it works. In fact, the reality is a little closer to what John
Wannamaker once famously quipped when he said, “half of the money I spend on
advertising is wasted, the problem is I don’t know which half” (Rust & Sajeev, 1996, p.
178). The relationship between an ad exposure and motivating a behavior is extremely
complex. Typically a consumer must have a need, or at least a desire, for your product or
service. Depending on where they are in the purchase funnel (Figure 1), one impression
(to say nothing about the creative execution) may not be enough. It may take several
impressions, and this is highly variable among people and situations. For example, it
may only take one ad impression to motivate you to purchase a widget, where it may take
one neighbor 5 impressions and another neighbor may never cross the purchase threshold.
Furthermore, advertising rarely evokes a decision at the time of exposure to an ad
(Millward-Brown & The Hershey Co., 2008).
Figure 1
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In reality, the role advertising plays on persuasion is only secondary. The real hallmark
of advertising is to establish and build the brand by reinforcing those feelings and
emotions that are connected to the brand. That connection, which develops over time
from all of the words, associations, ideas and images, forms a cumulative perception for
the consumer. Establishing awareness and reinforcing the brand are often overlooked but
are central components of marketing and in the long run, just as important as directly
motivating a purchase behavior.
Old School of Thought:
Marketers have had a long affiliation with the scientific concepts that pertain to the
underlying goals of marketing: 1) motivating a purchase, 2) creating awareness and 3)
building the brand, but in many cases, have not kept up with new learning. For example,
it has long been known that our emotions play a far greater role in influencing our
behavior than do our rational thoughts. Unfortunately, even this lesson has been lost on
many an advertiser who continues to blindly push out a product’s/service’s functional
benefits. In fact, marketers in general make little attempt to understand how to
effectively get information about their brand to consumers. They think that by
highlighting a brand’s functional benefit(s), consumers will draw the only rational
conclusion possible- to buy that product or service. The root of this problem is that
many marketers still cling to the old Behaviorist model that got a foothold in the 1950’s.
To the Behaviorists, consumer behavior can be explained as the response(s) made to
some outside stimulus i.e. those ads that live outside the body with no reference to mental
processes occurring inside the body. The fallacy here is that 1) marketers think they are
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able to control what consumers think about a brand through advertising and 2) that
purchase decisions are the direct result of the conscious, rational thought on the part of
the consumer (Weilbacher, 2003). We know that much of the cognition that occurs with
regard to advertising does so below conscious awareness and is deeply embedded in our
emotions. The old Behaviorist paradigm moved consumers through a very linear and
sequential process of going through a series of stages- AIDA (attention, interest, desire
and action) (Gordon, March 2003). This model was neat and tidy and seemed to make
sense and so it was eagerly embraced. As science has increased its knowledge base, the
new information has, generally speaking, not made its way to the marketing community.
A New Paradigm:
Today the new paradigm has its foundation built on the fields of neuroscience and
psychology. In Drew Westen’s (2008) book, The Political Brain, he describes how both
of these fields can now give keen insight as to what a brand is associated with and how
ads can change those associations in the brain. He further explains how the new science
can provide insight to the gut level reaction that consumers have to any element of
branding or advertising. To that end, when designing ads there are three areas that
advertisers need to focus on simultaneously in their quest to build solid brands and to sell
their products and services. The first is to understand how human sensation and
perception work. How do raw stimuli (the ad) get into the brain and once there, what
exactly does the brain do with it? How does it frame up the ad and bring meaning to it.
The second is to understand emotion and motivation. We need to understand how
emotions work, why they are so important, and how they color our perceptions (often
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unconsciously). Part and parcel to emotion is motivation. These two are as inexorably
linked as the ebb and flow of the tides and so it is difficult to talk about one without
including the other. The third is to understand how memory works. Specifically, how
our memories are created, how they are influenced by our emotions, how they can be
recalled and why some are forgotten.
The delicate interplay between these three areas is often misunderstood and usually
operates below the threshold of conscious awareness. This often leaves a certain amount
of discord between what we say or do and the underlying reason(s) why. Case in point:
most people could not tell you why they bought the car they did. Was there some
economical reason, was it emotionally based, or both? Market research knows that
emotions are tied to the equation and often tries to get consumers to verbalize these
emotions. This exercise instantly turns them into evaluators rather than consumers and is
the beginning of the discordance. At the end of the day, however, there are a number of
reasons for this dissonance. First, there is what Dan Hill (2007), calls the “Say/Feel”
Gap: the frequent disconnect between what people say and what they actually do. People
may tell you they watch The History Channel, but it is Dancing with the Stars that is
getting the ratings. Secondly, we know that brands work on an emotional level, yet we
ask consumers to make rational judgments about our products and services. We expect
them to be able to retrieve memories that are tied to these emotions but are below
conscious awareness and so are not readily accessible. Thirdly, a consumer’s initial
sensory impressions may lead them to an inaccurate perception if the experience is out of
context. The “Pepsi Challenge” is a classic example. Many people still remember when
The Coca-Cola Company rolled out New Coke in the early 1980s. Up through the 1970s
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Coke enjoyed a very substantial lead in market share over Pepsi. But by the early 1980s
Pepsi had narrowed the gap to just one percentage point and Coke was nervous. This loss
of market share was exacerbated by the fact that Coke was out-spending Pepsi by about
100 million in advertising and was also much more widely available than Pepsi.
When it seemed like it could not get any worse, Pepsi launched a TV campaign that they
called the “Pepsi Challenge.” They enlisted dedicated Coke drinkers to take a blind taste
test that pitted Coke against Pepsi. They asked the Coke devotees to take a sip from two
different glasses, one marked Q and one marked M, and asked which they preferred. The
tasters invariably chose M and when the preferred cola was revealed, it was of course,
Pepsi. Coke initially dismissed this as being staged for the commercial. But when they
secretly ran their own tests, their results were much the same. This was a true conundrum
for Coke. Their top secret original formula had always been the driving force behind
their success. Was it possible that cola drinkers’ tastes were changing? The top officials
at Coke had to take the “Pepsi Challenge” seriously. They were spending more on
advertising, were competitively priced, had more shelf space and twice as many vending
machines as Pepsi and yet they were losing market share. Taste was the obvious culprit
and if Coke was going to survive and regain its lead, it would have to change its taste.
Coke’s chemists began work in earnest, tweaking the famed Coke formula to make it
more like Pepsi. After tinkering with the formula they began to see results that closed the
gap between their new formula and Pepsi. Finally, hundreds of thousands of independent
tests later, they had leveled the playing field and in a press conference, Coke’s CEO had
announced the arrival of New Coke. Top execs were elated and they congratulated one
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another for making what was considered the boldest and most certain decision in the
company’s long history. This was a sure thing that couldn’t fail; but it did.
Consumers were outraged that the company would change the formula, and ultimately
the taste, of their beloved Coke. What seemed like a slam dunk, quickly morphed into a
PR disaster. After just a few months, The Coca-Cola Company was forced to bring back
the original formula, which they did under the moniker of Classic Coke. New Coke
gradually disappeared as did Pepsi’s rising star. Coke began to retake its market share
with a product that market research clearly said was inferior.
The story of Coke’s transformation is a good illustration of how important context can be.
The problem with the “Pepsi Challenge” was the method they used to discern consumer
preference. They used what the industry calls a sip test. Consumers are asked to take a
sip from each brand and select the one they like the best. The trouble with this method is
that a sip is very different from drinking a whole can. It turns out that a home-use test,
where you take home a whole case of the product and drink it over the course of a few
weeks, is a much better predictor. The consumers are not in an artificial setting i.e. out of
context. Enjoying the product at home with a meal, while doing yard work, or watching
TV reflects how they will really enjoy the product. Many Coke drinkers find the
sweetness of drinking just a sip of Pepsi to be gratifying. But a whole can is often
perceived as too sweet and overpowering (Gladwell, 2005). Consequently, reporting a
certain preference under artificial conditions (out of context) led to a false positive of
consumer preference.
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Influencing Factors for Ad Design:
Sensation & Perception:
Sensation:
Although this paper is not focusing on sensation, a brief definition and overview are
needed to properly understand perception. We have no direct access to our physical
world other than through one, or a combination of five sensory modalities: vision (seeing),
audition (hearing), olfaction (smell), gustation (taste) and the body senses, which are
comprised of tactile (touch) and kinesthesis (balance). Sensation is really the process of
getting the information (outside stimuli such as an ad) into the body and ultimately to the
brain, and turning it into a workable format (neural impulses) that the brain can
understand (Peiffer, 1996). For the purposes of this paper, we will focus primarily on
vision since it is our dominant sense. About 2/3 of all the stimuli that make it to the brain
are visual. In terms of the brain’s real estate, over 50% of it is devoted to processing
visual stimuli and 80% of learning is visually based. We are a very visual species. We
are hard wired to interpret pictures and images, yet advertisers insist on bombarding us
with words. Furthermore, research suggests that visual memory is often superior to
verbal memory (Esser, Die, Seholm & Pebley, 2001). The final irony is that the majority
of our communication, at least in non-specific situations, is nonverbal. So if you are
talking about something as innocuous as the best way to clean your oven, the majority of
your communication will be verbal. But if you just ran into someone you knew on the
street, most of that exchange would be non-verbal. In those ambiguous situations, facial
expressions account for 55% of communication. Thirty-eight percent is accounted for by
the tone of voice and only 7% of the communicative process ends up being verbal. This
is not surprising when you consider that human beings have been around for over half a
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million years, but have only had the benefit of language for less than a quarter of that
time (Hill, 2007).
What We Really See…
When you look at an ad, what you really see might surprise you. The image you see is
really upside down, out of focus and obscured by blood vessels. In fact, it is a wonder we
can see as well as we do. This is where the brain earns its keep. It has to straighten up
the image, fill in the holes, bring it into focus, and give it three dimensions. Then it goes
about the business of interpreting the stimulus (the ad). This process occurs
instantaneously and continuously and it all happens below our conscious awareness.
In addition, when we look at an ad, we do not initially perceive the whole ad. Instead, we
pick out various parts or components of the ad and fixate on that point, which is called
the center of gaze. The rest of the ad remains blurred until we fixate on each individual
element. Then we move our focus to another point, and then another, in little jumps
called saccades (Heath, 2009)(Bos, Hulsebos & Apple, 2004). Eventually, our brains
weave all of these parts together into one coherent ad (hopefully). Our brains go back
into memory for reference and in many cases, are able to determine what the ad is about
even before you look at all of the individual pieces; all the while creating the illusion that
we are seeing everything at the same time (Rayner & Serano, 1994). Once you
understand this process, you can see just how problematic communicating your message
on something like a billboard can be. We often do not have time to see all of the relevant
parts. Moreover, the billboard has to compete for attention with its
surroundings/environment. As a result, we often do not see everything on a billboard the
first time. The human eye actually picks up approximately 10 million bytes of visual
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information every second. However, only about 40 bytes per second become visual
images; which is a ratio of 25:1 (Hill, 2007). Therefore, it is of the utmost importance to
create a billboard in such a way that the most important parts draw attention to the eye.
Advertisers typically exacerbate the situation by making pictures too complex (too much
detail) as well as including too many words. Other extraneous variables like speed, line
of sight, amount of traffic and habituation intensify the problem of poor creative
execution. For billboards, the general rule of thumb is no more than 7 words and 1 or 2
other simple elements. The consumer, on average, has six (6) seconds to read and
process all of the elements on a billboard. This whole process is optimized under lowinvolvement conditions (meaning that we do not make the consumer work too hard to
figure it out). Once, however, this information makes it to the brain, sensation ends and
perception begins.
Perception:
Perception is the process of organizing and interpreting the incoming information. When
we look at something, the incoming image accounts for the bulk of the perceptual process,
but not all of it. Memories, past learning experiences, expectations and emotions are all
used in the overall perceptual process. This explains why people might see the same
event but perceive it very differently. Take a baseball game for instance. The runner at
first steals second and the catcher fires the ball to the second baseman. The umpire calls
the runner out and half of the fans are elated and confident that the umpire has made the
correct call. The other half think the umpire needs glasses because clearly, the runner
was safe. How can they all see the same event, yet perceive it so differently? Putting
aside the fact that people saw it from different angles and distances, the answer is that the
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actual play happened so fast, that they were not able to see every detail. The brain,
however, fills in the missing information by drawing upon, among other things, our
emotional biases. That is, we end up seeing what we were hoping to see. All of this
occurs below conscious awareness but people are so convinced that they saw the whole
chain of events that this type of scenario can sometimes come to blows between fans.
Raw visual sensations are like the unassembled parts of a TV. They must be assembled
in an organized way before they are useful to us (Prinzmetal, 1995). With respect to
visual perception, there are a number of processes that occur, below conscience
awareness, that help us to frame up the perception. Among these are depth perception,
perceptual constancy (the tendency for perceptions of objects to remain relatively
unchanged in spite of changes in raw sensations) and several principles of visual
perception developed by Gestalt Psychology. The Gestalt approach emphasizes that we
perceive objects as well defined “wholes” rather than separate parts.
Here are a few
examples of these principles and how they work.
Gestalt Principles of Perceptual Organization:
1) Figure-Ground - this is the fundamental way we organize visual perceptions. When we
look at an object, we see the object (the figure) and the background (the ground). For
example, look carefully at Figure 2. Do you see the vase in the center of the picture? If
so, you perceive the blue area as the figure and the black area as the ground. If you
switch the two and see the black area as the figure and the blue area as the ground, you
will perceive two profiles of faces staring at each other. Your perceptual outcome is
contingent upon which part of the stimulus (picture) you see as the figure and which part
you see as the ground.
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Figure 2
2) Proximity - Objects that are close to each other in space are often perceived as
belonging together. Because of this principle, we tend to perceive Figure 3 as
columns and Figure 4 as rows.
Figure 3
Figure 4
3) Similarity - states that objects that are similar are perceived as belonging
together. In Figure 5, we tend to perceive a series of columns because we tend to
group similar objects together.
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Figure 5
(Matlin & Foley, 1992).
How it works:
With respect to advertising, there are a number of visual cues that determine how we
view an ad that are important for good ad design. The most important of these cues
include: Faces, Text, Color, Contrast, Edges and Boundaries, and Object size
(Association of National Advertisers Midwest Marketers Committee, 2010). In fact, the
regions of the brain that are activated for pictures and images and other non-verbal
communication are different from those that are activated for words/language. To
illustrate, let us go back to our billboard example. When you look at a billboard, your
eyes will be drawn to pictures and images before words. Furthermore, when looking at
pictures or images, your eyes will be drawn to faces first; which is at the top of the
hierarchy.
In western culture we have been conditioned to read from left to right. In Figure 6 we
tend to look at the picture in the middle first. Then our eyes track to the right to read the
words. Next, our eyes must jump all the way to the left side of the board to read those
words. Since you have juxtaposed the words from the intended flow, you must
unscramble them and then try to decode the meaning of the billboard. Although a design
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like this may be aesthetically pleasing, it is not conducive to the way in which we take in
stimuli and then perceive it. Had the design taken this into account you would have been
able to decode the meaning faster and easier, which in turn would allocate more of your
cognitive resources to focus on the message and involve your emotions. The ideal ad will
be balanced between scientific dogma and artistic style.
Figure 6
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Emotion & Motivation:
Why are emotions so important in advertising? All marketers know that it is important to
tap into the consumer’s emotions, but most do not know why or how. It seems very
intuitive to try and connect to a consumer’s emotions, but why exactly, is it so important?
A logical starting point for this discussion is to first give an overview of just how and
why emotions work and how they are linked to motivation. Although both emotion and
motivation are capable of working independently of one another, they usually do not.
Most of the time motivation and emotion work in concert with one another; largely
because they are both controlled by the same parts of the brains as well as the same parts
of the nervous system. In the brain, motivation and emotion live in an area called the
Limbic System; sometimes referred to as the “emotional brain.” Here there are several
structures that play a role in how we view and make decisions about advertising, among
other things: 1) The Amygdala is involved in the formation and storage of memories that
are associated with emotional events (Buchanan, 2007). 2) The Hypothalamus is a close
neighbor to the Amygdala and is intimately involved with both physical and
psychological motivation as well as emotion. One of the most important functions of the
hypothalamus is to link the nervous system to the endocrine system (glands). 3) The
Hippocampus processes emotional related information and plays a vital role in creating
and retrieving long-term memories. It is considered the bridge between short and longterm memory and in Alzheimer’s patients is often one of the first regions of the brain to
suffer damage (Jacobs & Schenck, 2003).
In the Nervous System, motivation and emotion live in the part called the Autonomic
Nervous System (ANS), which is a division of the Peripheral Nervous System. The ANS
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is responsible for carrying messages to and from the glands and visceral organs to the
brain, and has three main functions:
1. Oversight of essential body functions of the visceral organs like
heartbeat, digestion, breathing, etc.
2. Oversight of emotions
3. Oversight of motives
To show you just how closely linked these three are, consider the performer who is just
about to go on stage and is experiencing butterflies. This is certainly a common scenario,
but what is really going on? As the performer’s ANS is dealing with the high level of
anxiety (emotion) over performing in front of an audience, it over-compensates or goes
overboard in dealing with some of the visceral organs. In this case, churning up the
performer’s stomach. Similarly, consider the person who is experiencing a stressful life
event, like losing their job. They have barely eaten anything in days. How many people
do we know that cannot eat when they are stressed, or that eat everything in sight? In this
case, the ANS is dealing with the high stress level (emotion) and again, goes overboard in
adjusting the level of hunger, which is part of physical motivation. Consequently, you
can see the advantage of tapping into someone’s emotions as it may directly or indirectly
influence their motivation. We know that ads evoking strong emotions are more
motivating. So influencing the right emotion at the right time may activate that coveted
purchase behavior (motivation).
Motivation and emotion share three common properties:
1. Both can activate behavior;
2. Motives are often accompanied by emotions. For example, a motive to do well on
a job interview is often accompanied by anxiety;
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3. Emotions often have motivational properties of their own. For example,
someone who is in love is often motivated to spend time with that special person.
Now that we have a basic understanding of how the system works, let us take a closer
look at how it relates to advertising. The Journal of Advertising Research conducted a
study in which 23,000 US consumers found that when it comes to making purchase
decisions, emotions are twice as important as facts (Kim, Geason, Woo, & Morris, 2002).
From a very top-line view, think of the brain as being divided into 3 parts: the sensory
part, the emotional part and the rational part. We use the sensory part to bring
information into the brain and to send that information to the proper parts of the brain for
further processing. So for all intents and purposes, the incoming information is sent to
either the emotional or rational parts of the brain. The emotional part is much larger than
the rational part. In fact, there are 10 times the number of signals running from the
emotional brain to the rational brain than the other way around (Hill, 2007). The old
analogy of the Elephant (emotional part) and the Rider (rational part) is a good
illustration of how this works. As the Rider sits atop of the Elephant, he appears to be the
one in control; and under many circumstances that is the case. However, the Elephant
can usurp the Rider’s control at anytime and we all experience this numerous times every
day. For example, your alarm goes off and the Rider (the rational part) knows that it is
time to get up. But suddenly, the Elephant (the emotional part) takes over and you end
up hitting the snooze button and falling back to sleep (Haidt, 2006). Clearly you can see
that appealing to the rational part of the brain with your company’s functional benefits is
usually not nearly as effective as appealing to the emotional part (Heath, Nairn, &
Bottomley, 2009). The irony is that while a company may believe its product or service
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is functionally superior to its competitors, most of the decision making by the consumers
is emotionally based. Emotional reactions are really the gatekeeper to other cognitive
processes and ultimately, to behavior (Poels & Dewitte, 2006). Objectivity is more a
case of smoke and mirrors because it unwittingly gets colored by emotion. Purposely
playing to this undercurrent will almost always net greater commercial gain.
Once again we look to The Coca-Cola Company to provide a good example. During
WWII, many companies were putting global expansion on hold. Not so for Cokes’
charismatic president, Robert Woodruff. He was committed to getting Coke to American
troops for a nickel a bottle no matter what it cost the company. He sent 64 portable
bottling plants to the European Theatre of War and parts of the Pacific. The net result
was that 11 million troops came back after the war with a profound loyalty to Coke.
During the war, getting a Coke was just as important as getting a letter from home. It had
that deep emotional tie to home and in many ways it symbolized what it was they were
fighting for (“Coca-Cola: the real story,” 2009). This outcome was not the intended
result of the campaign. What was intended to be Coke fulfilling its role as a good
corporate citizen by doing “the right thing,” had a beneficial by-product of making a deep
emotional connection that yielded extreme loyalty for years to come.
Emotions color perceptions and influence how we process information. They greatly
influence, and under certain circumstances, can even dictate decision making outcomes.
Even the most rational people are influenced by their emotions more than they know.
Yet, much of the advertising community remains largely unaware of their true power.
Somehow appealing to a consumer’s rational brain seems intuitively correct. Perhaps the
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explanation lies in the little known fact that most of our mental activity (including a great
deal of our emotional impact) occurs below conscious awareness. Sigmund Freud used
the analogy of an iceberg to explain the relationship. Only the tip of the iceberg shows
itself above the water line. The majority of the iceberg remains hidden under water.
Consciousness, Freud posited, has the same relationship (Barrett, Niedenthal &
Winkielman, 2005). Only a very small part of our mental activity actually occurs within
the realm of conscious awareness. In fact, less than .0005% of all our mental processing
is considered conscious. The human brain can take in as much as 400 billion bytes of
info per second, but only consciously processes about 2,000 bytes (Hill, 2007). So what
is going on below conscious awareness, in what Freud called the unconscious? Well, for
starters, virtually all of your biological processes. For example, you do not have to
consciously think about your stomach digesting food, or your lungs exchanging carbon
dioxide for oxygen, or having your heart pump blood throughout your body. All of this
happens unconsciously, but it takes a lot of brain power. Even activity that is more
cognitive in nature often occurs below the threshold of conscious awareness. We rely
heavily on something called our adaptive consciousness, which includes all of the
different ways that our brain understands the world around us that our body and mind
(conscious and unconscious) must navigate. It is our adaptive conscious that makes it
possible for us to drive a car and make a turn without having to consciously do complex
calculations about the speed of the vehicle and the angle of the turn. This complex
relationship between the conscious and unconscious explains the illusion that our rational
brain is the one making all the decisions.
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Does it matter which emotions we use?
From an advertiser’s perspective, which emotions to tap into is largely dependant on their
goals. It will vary from advertiser to advertiser and campaign to campaign but you
should begin with the end in mind (Covey, 2004). Effective advertising design cuts
through the clutter and is able to capture the consumer’s attention. In many cases, two of
the best emotions to achieve this goal are happiness and surprise:

Advertisers need consumers to pay attention to their advertising and research has
indicated that happiness and surprise ensure high attention levels.

Happiness and surprise are also action oriented. When we experience these
emotions we tend to strive for results.
Beyond this, happiness begins to out-pace surprise:

Decision making contingencies are influenced by emotion. When we are happy,
we tend to go quickly because we have little concern. Surprise, on the other hand,
tends to paralyze our decision making.

Finally, happiness also has the tendency to lead us to greater risk taking, even if
the reward is low.
Emotional vs. Rational Thought ala Dan Hill:
Here is a condensed summary of the importance of emotion:
o Emotion drives reason more than reason drives emotion;
o The essential differences between emotion and reason are:
1. we feel first and last in the decision making process
2. we feel more quickly than we think
3. even the formation of memories is emotionally based
4. most of our mental activity occurs below conscious awareness
 Both sensory and emotional brains operate subconsciously
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5. mental activity is often initiated by visual sensory impressions that
lead to emotional responses;
o Emotion leads to action while reason leads to conclusions;
o Recall is emotion-based;
o Delivering a unique emotional value proposition is the key to success. How
consumers respond to price points is profoundly influenced by their emotions;
o People often do not make logical choices. Instead, they go with their gut
reactions and justify them afterwards with intellectual alibis;
o The single most important distinction for business is that thoughts, unlike
emotions, aren’t action oriented.
Memory:
Imagine what life would be like if you did not have memory. Every time you wanted to
tie your shoes, you would have to relearn it. Every time you wanted to drive to a friends
house, you would have to relearn the route, not to mention relearning how to drive a car.
Life would be profoundly different.
The Stage Theory of Memory asserts that there are three different stages (Baddeley,
1999). The process generally starts with sensory input from the outside world making it
to the brain and thus, into the first stage of memory called Sensory Register (SR). At this
point the information is just those first basic sensory impressions, such as a smell that is
pleasant or unpleasant, or a light that is very bright. The information is generally held in
your SR for less than one second. If you do not send it on for further processing, it drops
out in the form of forgetting. If you do move it on, which is often an unconscious
process; it goes to the second stage of memory called Short-Term Memory (STM). The
most important thing to know about STM is that its capacity for storage is extremely
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limited. The rule of thumb is that the average person’s STM can hold 7± 2 bits of
information. That is 5-9 individual pieces of information. So if I were to give you 8
random numbers, most people would be able to hold that amount information in their
STM. But, we can generally only hold that information for 30 seconds or less before it
drops out in the form of forgetting. We can, however, keep the information in STM for
longer periods of time by using a process called Rehearsal. This is the mental repetition
of the information such as a shopping list. Suppose your spouse asked you to go to the
store and pick up milk, eggs, bread and a sack of potatoes. You could put that in your
STM, but if you did not rehearse it, it would be forgotten in about 30 seconds. If you did
rehearse the list, you could keep it in your STM for very long periods of time.
There is also a process that can be used to increase the amount of information that you
can hold in your STM. The process is called Chunking and it is done by finding common
attributes among the information and combining it by those attributes (Miller, 1956). For
instance, look at the following list and try to remember all twelve words.
East
Hearts
Summer
Spades
South
Spring
Diamonds
Winter
North
Clubs
West
Fall
Ordinarily you would have difficulty remembering the entire list because it exceeds the
7± 2 bits of information rule. But if you find the commonality among the list, you will
see that you can combine the list into 3 Chunks; points of a compass, suits of playing
cards and the seasons. The 7± 2 rule applies to chunks as well bits. So in this case,
instead of 12 bits of information you have 3 chunks and that is well within the 7± 2 limit.
It is no accident that phone numbers are broken up the way they are. It would be difficult
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to remember the phone number 2158675309 because there are too many bits of
information. But once we break it into 3 chunks, (215) 867-5306, it is much easier. The
last point to make about STM is that it is also referred to as your working memory. Since
STM is our “working memory,” engaging in other functions such as thinking about what
you want to buy at the store when you get there, results in forgetting the phone number of
the store that you just looked up. Thinking uses space in the STM and the new info
always forces out the old (Baddeley, 1999).
Finally, if the information has not dropped out of the system in the form of forgetting, it
is sent on for processing in the final stage; Long-Term Memory (LTM). For all intents
and purposes, most psychologists believe that LTM is permanent (Bahrick, 1984).
Once the information makes it to LTM, it is in there for good. Why then do we forget
things? There are several theories that address the reasons that we forget, but suffice it to
say that the problem is generally with the retrieval mechanism, not that the information is
not there.
Types of Long Term Memories:
What is important for this discussion is that LTM is really divided into 3 different types:
Procedural, Semantic and Episodic (Tulving, 1985, 2002). Your Procedural LTM is your
memory for skills and motor movements. Anything that requires rote movement would
fall into this category. Playing the piano, shuffling a deck of cards, or riding a bicycle are
all examples of Procedural LTM. Once you have learned a new motor skill, it is saved in
your Procedural LTM. You may go for years without using that skill, but once you call
on it, it will still be there. This is where the cliché “it’s like riding a bike” comes from.
You may not have ridden for 20 years, but once you climb back on that bike, you will
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still be able to ride. The skills will typically not be as clean and sharp as they once were,
but they will still be accessible. Unlike Semantic and Episodic LTM, your Procedural
LTM can only be accessed through performance.
Semantic LTM is memory for meaning without reference to time or place of learning.
What a piano, deck of cards or bicycle is, are all examples of your Semantic LTM. You
know what a bicycle is, but you most likely do not remember when or where you were
when you learned what a bike was.
Finally, we have our Episodic LTM, which is memory for experiences that can be defined
in terms of time and space. Memories of your high school prom, your first job interview
or that special vacation you took with your family to Hershey when you were twelve, are
all examples of your Episodic LTM. We can often remember many details of these
experiences. If you stop and think back to your favorite family vacation while you were
growing up, you can most likely recall; who you were with, the season/time of year, your
age, the weather, and specific events. This vacation may have been 25 years ago, but we
are able to remember many of the details as if it just happened. Episodic LTM is the type
of LTM that we, as marketers, are typically interested in creating and tapping into.
How Does this Apply to Advertising?
The psychological research clearly show us that ads which evoked emotional responses
are more memorable. Furthermore, emotional ads have better recall when the encoding is
focused for Episodic LTM as opposed to Semantic LTM. This process is optimized
when the consumer is viewing/listening to an ad with a particular goal in mind. In other
words, if a consumer is shopping for a car, they are much more inclined to be an active
rather than a passive participant in a car ad and will focus their cognitive resources on the
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ad (Friestad & Thorson, 1993). If the ad has a story line that the consumer can relate to,
it can form an episodic memory trace. But the consumer can also recall an episodic
memory that was formed under experiential processing (something the consumer actually
experienced that is parallel to the story in the ad). The memory trace for the actual
experience can strengthen the one in the ad, especially if it is emotionally charged. This
will ultimately make the ad even more memorable. Of course this is easier said than
done because there are many variables to account for such as;
1. the intensity level of the consumers focus on the ad
2. the congruency between the ad’s event (story line in the ad) and the recollection
of the real life event, which is tied to Tulving and Thomson’s (1973) Encoding
Specificity Principle;
3. and Reconstructive Memory Theory, i.e. how memory is reconstructed at the time
of retrieval.
Implications:

Psychology and neuroscience provide us with a framework upon which we can create
more effective ads by taking advantage of the knowledge they provide. Today we
must move beyond just interesting and creative ads and fully exploit the natural way
that our brain and sense organs collect and process information. Once that
information (ad) makes it to our brain, we must consider the roles memory and
emotions will play in coloring and influencing its meaning. Our creative executions
must consider both the short-term goals of creating awareness and motivating a
purchase behavior, and the long-term goals of creating and reinforcing the brand.
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How can we be compelling enough to break through the clutter and evoke a
consumer’s attention?

There is a plethora of research that addresses each one of these topics and dissects
them to understandable and useable concepts. Although looking at them individually
is limiting as it silo’s the learning. It is tantamount to sharing only the moral of a
story. The moral is interesting and you can derive some value, but not framing the
moral in the context of the whole story is extremely limiting.

Using these learnings affectively will enhance your creative execution but is not a
magic bullet. Even at its highest level, creative that incorporates all three is still only
part of the advertising equation. You must also have an effective media plan as well
as a good product or service. If you are able to move a consumer to purchase your
product/service but it is inferior, the prospect of converting that consumer into a loyal
customer and ultimately to a brand advocate is greatly diminished; to say nothing of
the negative word of mouth. In this case, virtually all of your hard work in
developing superior creative becomes moot.

Companies need to figure out which values are emotionally important to their
customers and then make sure they deliver on them.

Advertising that is emotionally powerful is more likely to generate emotional
associations as well as positive feelings about the brand.

Understand what is happening emotionally as customers interact with your product or
service. These underlying emotions are the ones you want to recreate in your
advertising. They are the emotions that will awaken those long-term memories that
were created and can subsequently drive those customers to purchase behaviors.
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