Subtleties and Their Implications

A little excerpt from Malcolm Gladwell's best seller, "The Tipping Point":

A large group of students were recruited for what they were told was a market research study by a company headset and and told that the company wanted to test to see how well they worked when the listener was in motion - dancing up and down, say, or moving his or her head. All of the students listened to songs by Linda Ronstandt and the Eagles, and then heard a radio editorial arguing that tuition at their university should be raised from its present level of $587 to $750. A third were told that while they listened to the taped radio editorial they should nod their heads vigorously up and down. The next third were told to shake their heads from side to side. The final third were the control group. They were told to keep their heads still. When they were finished, all the students were given a short questionnaire, asking them questions about the quality of the songs and the effect of the shaking. Slipped in at the end was the question the experimenters really wanted and answer to: "What do you feel would be an appropriate dollar amount for undergraduates tuition per year?"
The answers to that question are... difficult to believe...The students who kept their heads still were unmoved by the editorial. The tuition amount that they guessed was appropriate was $582 - or just about where tuition was already. Those who shook their heads from side to side as they listened to the editorial - even though they thought they were simply testing headset quality - strongly with the proposed increase. They wanted tuition to fall on average to $467 a year. Those who were told to nod their heads up and down, meanwhile, found the editorial very persuasive. They wanted tuition to rise, on average, to $646. The simple act of moving their heads up and down, ostensibly for another reason entirely - was sufficient to cause them to recommend a policy that would take money out of their pockets.

I mention this excerpt for a couple of reasons. One is that it is so very interesting to reaffirm how strong the unconscious behaviors - which have no conscious semantic value - can influence a person's conscious beliefs and attitudes. This is not unlike the well-known psychological effect we see when a person deliberately smiling can actually physiologically modify their mood to a happier state.

I want to stress to designers and marketing geniuses alike, that often times people's subconscious cues can be as strong, if not stronger, than actual deliberate conscious thought about something.

What can be learned from this? Two things: One is that Marketers can have have a greater effect with their advertising if they cater to people's subconscious processing. I am not talking about subliminal messages (which have been shown in many studies to be a complete farce). Rather, I mean to use knowledge about people's motor circuits, or even their mirror neurons (empathy, reflection of other people's actions and emotions) to develop campaigns that take advantage of this, without being discovered by their conscious recognition.

If you are trying to market a basketball, you don't need to explain to the customer all of the benefits and specifications in order to make them understand at a cognitive level how good the ball is. You don't need to endorse a celebrity. You also don't need to spend millions of dollars on great writing and dense traffic times for a good television commercial. All you need to do is force the consumers, at a basic processing level, to associate this ball with positive thoughts about sports and performance. There are many ways to do this, such as the use of high-tempo and rhythmic music, or hi-definition shots of muscles in action with sweat droplets (Gatorade commercials come to mind with their striking neon-colored sweat that resembles the sports drink itself), which engage the consumers at a visceral layer of their subconscious processing. If the person actually goes out to buy the basketball, they will not say that it is because they heard upbeat tunes on the commercial, or that he/she liked the hi-res sweat on the muscles. In most cases, they will either claim they don't know why they chose this over others, or - more likely - they will rationalize their decision with concrete, logical points.

Many of these message are well-implemented by the marketing geniuses of the world. However, I am willing to bet that a lot of them don't know why it works, and therefore may sometimes be hindered to come up with effective ideas in realms they are not experienced with.

The second thing we can learn from Gladwell's references example is that designers need to pay strong attention to the basic subconscious processing abilities of consumers, the emotional design levels of their designed products. They need to pay strong attention to it because it works, and it manipulates people's cognitive opinions.

This may be best served by reading Don Norman's "Emotional Design." In this book, Norman points out that products are embraced by the masses not only if they are effective and usable, but also if they are aesthetically pleasing at the visceral level of use. A writing pen may be just as usable and efficient as another, but if it looks sharp, has a nice feel and weight to it, and perhaps may even at some higher emotional level create an associative attachment to how you acquired it, or how you used it once to fill out an application to a job you were got, you will most likely heavily favor this pen against others...

It's just a pen...isn't it?