How brands can stay ahead of changing perceptions

To say that marketers rely heavily on visual elements to communicate meanings is to state the obvious. 

However, once an image has been perceived by a potential customer, they are always filtering and interpreting such sensory information in relation to their personal experiences. That’s why we often hear “How are we making our customers feel?". Or, "Find the emotion and you’ll be miles ahead of someone who’s just thinking about the brand”. 

To impact behaviour advertisers need a message that increases the perceived goal value of a brand.

Which is true... to some extent.

Above: Customer survey responses aren't necessarily the best way to understand consumer behaviour. 

The power of emotional response

There’s no denying emotional appeals connect with customers more deeply than rational ones. If an ad is emotionally engaging, it is more likely to be remembered, therefore having a positive effect on brand recall, as well as on the mental availability of the brand in the minds of consumers.

If an ad is emotionally engaging, it is more likely to be remembered.

The problem is that sometimes, even though a piece of advertising evokes high arousal in a certain target audience, ultimately no one remembers the brand. That’s because the central ideal of the advert was not properly linked to the brand in the first place. To impact behaviour advertisers need a message that increases the perceived goal value of a brand.

Take John Lewis & Partners' Christmas advertising, for instance. What makes it so successful is that both the message of the ad and the driver of emotional response are rooted in unique truths of the brand: how thoughtful they are to their customers’ wants and lives, and their ability to deliver a product that perfectly meets these needs.

The downside of focus groups

Now, if marketing communications is all about driving behaviour in favour of a brand and managing people’s perceptions and experiences of it, then the best performing campaigns will be those that understand the true dynamics of decision-making, and how to use those dynamics for effective advertising. 

Information arrives as a fact; because it has been said by consumers, we believe it must be true.

Traditionally, brands and agencies have relied on focus groups and heavily generalised surveys to understand consumer behaviour better. Regrettably, when it comes to trusting what people say in this type of research, results are misplaced for two reasons. First; people have no access to the unconscious mental traits that drive most of their decision-making. Second; the mere process of asking people what they think exerts its own unconscious influences to quite an extent.

In most organisations, information arrives from a survey or focus group and is propagated around the organisation as a fact; because it has been said by consumers, we believe it must be true. But how impactful can the problem of inadvertent research influence be?

Above: John Lewis's Christmas ads are "rooted in unique truths of the brand".

Understanding System 1 and System 2

Cognitive psychologists have developed a powerful tool for understanding how people react to imagery called implicit response tests which are designed to measure what we know as System 1 responses. While psychologists used to think of our minds as being made up of the conscious and the subconscious, they now think in terms of Systems 1 and 2. Immortalised in Daniel Kahneman’s book Thinking Fast and Slow, we have a slow, deliberate and conscious mode, and a fast, automatic and non-conscious mode.

System 1 is the automatic and often unconscious processes that deliver intuitive thinking. It operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort, and no sense of voluntary control. There are two variants that influence fast thinking: the expert and the heuristic [a mental shortcut], both entirely automatic mental activities of perception and memory.

While psychologists used to think of our minds as being made up of the conscious and the subconscious, they now think in terms of Systems 1 and 2.

System 2, on the other hand, comes into play when the spontaneous search for an intuitive solution fails. When neither an expert solution nor a heuristic answer comes to mind. In such cases, we find ourselves switching to a slower, more deliberate and effortful form of thinking.

The control of attention is shared by the two systems. Whilst System 2 has some ability to change the way System 1 works by programming the normally automatic functions of attention and memory, System 1 effortlessly originates impressions and feelings that are the main sources of the explicit beliefs and deliberate choices of System 2.

Above: Psychologist and economist Daniel Kahneman’s book, Thinking Fast and Slow.

Implicit responses to campaign imagery

We’ve all experienced seeing an image of a product and feeling an automatic pull of desire, or seeing a magazine ad and feeling intrigued to gaze at it for longer than normal, without quite knowing why. A good design may just feel right or be instantly fascinating and engaging, yet we don’t always know the reason behind it. That is System 1 doing its job. It automatically and intuitively governs most of our responses to imagery. We see an image and a feeling automatically pops into our minds. We call these gut feelings, or first impressions.

A good design may just feel right or be instantly fascinating and engaging, yet we don’t always know the reason behind it.

This also means that we don’t always know why we like what we like. For this reason, as mentioned before, simply asking people why they like an image can be misleading. This is where implicit response tests come in: they give us a way to measure reactions without the need to directly ask people. Some of the general things that have been discovered about how we perceive images include: 

● We pay more attention to visuals in our left visual field than our right. This is due to a slight advantage that the right cortex of the brain has in processing visuals, and information from our left visual field  is first to get fed into the right cortex of our brains. There is a very slight tendency for us to exaggerate the number of elements of something if we see it to our left rather than if it’s placed to our right.

● The more we see something, the more we tend to like it. We’re wired to automatically value familiarity. Yet our brains also can’t always readily tell the difference between something that is easy for us to understand and an image that we’ve seen before. This means that images that are simple or easy on the eye can feel familiar, hence we are more comfortable with them.

● The beauty in averageness effect: whereby we find things attractive if they represent the statistical average of all typical examples.

● The first impressions effect: our attitude towards an image, whether we like it or not, is formed within a second. This effect is important when, for example, designing a landing page for a website or launching a new product.