Yesterday I went on a rant about how marketeers don’t use cognitive science in their decision making process. While I suspect that there are a few ‘savvy’ marketeers who will attempt to, for the most part it they don’t.
The video above is interesting because it’s an actual cognitive experiment by Duke University that is aimed squarely at understanding what role cognition plays in relation to consumers and brands.
However, the conclusion that the experimenters arrive at, that marketing resources may be put to better use generating super short, almost unnoticeable brand experiences, is erroneous in my opinion. For starters, the Apple logo does not inherently make people ‘more creative’. Apple has spent years marketing it’s products through various different channels in order to create a link between the Apple brand and ‘creativity’ in consumers minds. Without that previous ground work from Apple, there would be no pattern to recognize in the results. Score 1 for old fashioned marketing.
And who knows, maybe the Apple logo has no effect on creativity, but the IBM logo has a diminishing effect. There’s also no statistical data mentioned. The results could be real but insignificant for all we know.
There’s also a lot of cognitive science which both supports and criticizes every other marketing medium such as television advertising or presence marketing. If we were to ask someone like the Cochrane Foundation to do some meta analysis on all the available studies, my gut feeling is that they would reach no conclusion at all. We may well put television advertising through defensive mental filters, but that doesn’t mean it has no beneficial effective.
But ultimately, it comes down to the real world implications. No self respecting marketing weasel (I quite like the term now, weasels have a lot of good qualities) would tell Nike or Ford to abandon television advertising because they’d be laughed out of the room. Nor does anyone want the job of orchestrating something as subtle and demanding as what this video suggests. And going back to my first point, without that T.V. exposure or press coverage, what message do you expect to carry in those subliminal messages?
Let me be clear however, I’m not saying this isn’t an important field of research because it clearly is, and who knows, in the future it may yield some genuinely useful and applicable techniques for people to apply. But for now, it’s interesting yet useless, and more importantly, it’s marketing people marketing their marketing insight to other marketeers, so take it with a pinch of salt.
