Often, psychologists and neuroscientists are playing a game of ‘catch-up’ with marketing people. In our attempts to understand consumer behaviour we are looking for underlying mechanisms that can be identified and replicated, and that explain why something that we’ve seen used in marketing has been successful (or why something that seems illogical happens nevertheless).

Great creatives – those who make the ads that cause us to want and like brands – often have an intuitive understanding of what will resonate with people and influence consumer behaviour.

Cast your mind across adverts that you’ve seen over the years and consider the common themes:

• Beautiful women
• Bright lighting / sunshine
• Healthy faces
• Puppys (young animals, cute animals)
• Cute kids
• A suggestion of romance between people in the ad (or general sex appeal)
• Humour
• Music and rhythmic phrases

I’m not claiming that my list is rigorously researched or the result of systematic analysis, but the point is that certain themes tend to repeat. It’s likely that these elements are connecting with our unconscious minds in a powerful way.

Recent research has revealed why one of these recurring themes might work on us in a specific way, and it has fascinating implications for anyone involved in advertising or marketing.

Researchers showed participants a number of different advertisements (public service announcements such as the danger of smoking, drinking excessive alcohol and reckless driving) and then gave them an opportunity both to donate money to support the particular cause and to express how much they empathised with the message it was delivering.

However, before showing them the ads, people sniffed a spray that either contained the hormone oxytocin or else a placebo.

Oxytocin is a fascinating hormone. It is associated with trust and happiness; it may also be important to our sense of general well-being. It has been speculated that its primary evolutionary role is in creating the bond between parents and their babies, and more widely to the social bonding that is evidently important to us as a species.

The experiment discovered that people donated 56% more money to the causes when they had been exposed to the hormone spray compared with the placebo; they also said that the ads had made them empathise more with the issues and causes they were promoting.

Of course oxytocin production is an unconsciously activated response to a stimulus. When we watch an ad and it contains a puppy or a kitten or a baby it has the capacity to trigger the release of the hormone.

The relationship between the conscious and unconscious mind is such that messages aren’t passed directly – it’s a feeling that emerges that the conscious mind attempts to decode (something I call ‘The Mind Gap’). So in the case of advertising that includes these empathy-triggering components we can find ourselves attracted to the brand or product.

Our conscious mind will tell itself, “That product looks good” or “I agree” or “I want to support that cause”, but this may be relatively little to do with the actual focus of the ad: instead our response to empathise has been triggered and we misattribute it to what (thanks to the advertiser) we happen to see next.

So if you have a brand or product that you want people to feel more empathetic towards, the associations you build around it, provided they are congruent (i.e. they don’t jar with the consumer and cause them to consciously question why, for instance, someone has put a puppy on an aeroplane seat) can trigger influential responses at an unconscious level.

Recognising the fundamental associations most people hold – and when I say fundamental I mean those significant to us at an evolutionary level – can enable you to create powerfully influential communication because it can be harnessed to trigger the hormonal reactions that drive our behaviour.

The fact that this is consumer behaviour rather than the furthering of the species isn’t a distinction the conscious mind is equipped to make.

But, as is always the case, harnessing powerful associations carries a risk; if your product doesn’t deliver those same associations become a marker that it should be avoided next time around.

Source: Society for Neuroscience (2010, November 16). Oxytocin increases advertising’s influence: Hormone heightened sensitivity to public serviceannouncements.

Image courtesy: Will Marlow