Sigmund Freud's nephew and Marketing - What do they have in common?
"Open Happiness", "Just do it", "Think differently" - These are some of the most recognized brand-tags. They all have one thing in common.
Phew! I like to stray away from click-bait headlines. But in writing, you realize it is a great way to build unnecessary suspense to the readers. I was also told by leading how-to blogging sites that people love when there are images in blog-posts. It reminded me of my 2 year old niece’s nursery rhyme book. So I am going to add images throughout this article, some of which might be utterly irrelevant or not funny.
In this post I want to talk about the most pervasive, invisible ether that we all live amidst - Advertisements. More broadly marketing. Now some of you might feel marketing teams are well-dressed people who go on brunches and talk solely in jargon. They are also one of the few teams that can break any meeting with “Come, It is John’s cake cutting” with zero impunity. While that may be true, the reality is advertising has been around since man realized bullock-carts sell better with a woman standing next to it and this insight required considerable A/B testing (In the horizon, one can see the product-managers jump with joy when their livelihood-skill gets a mention). But it has not been this cut and dry. For starters, advertising has been considered deeply manipulative and some ads have also been awarded for their manipulative effect on viewers.
Advertisements now, do more than just inform about the product. Some marketing teams even believe talking about products can even be detrimental to the brand. Ads these days do something different. They connect themselves to an emotional response. And that’s why I put them as tagline to this post - Open happiness, Just do it or Think differently. It could be happiness, a sense of belonging or even make you feel like the next Da Vinci. That’s right. I am referring to those round pegs in square holes.
But these are all things we knew earlier. We all know how advertisements now connect with your emotional part which experts believe form a far deeper bond with the product or service than mere enlisting details. And what is better than an irrational linkage to your brand (Consciously I still don’t see my sober self gobbling those chicken McNuggets).
Below image : How business owners think customers act after watching their ads, Source - Shamelessly stolen from Google
But I want to talk something interesting - Origins.
The insight that connecting to one’s irrational self, primal urges makes consumers far malleable, came not from marketing but psychology. It came from Edward Bernays, nephew of Sigmund Freud, who is fondly considered Father of Public Relations. Bernays was born in America and soon rose to be one of the most influential characters in what some like to call turning citizens into consumers. With a background in psychology, Bernays was instrumental in bringing those ideas to field of business. This was around 1920s when American businesses realized that there is a chance that people have enough and they might not buy more. If they don’t buy more, businesses can’t grow. A report from Lehman Brothers around 1920s even went as far as mentioning, “…For America to grow, we should substitute needs with desires…Man’s want must overshadow his needs”. Bernays did just that.
I will talk about two stories today which hopefully will let you appreciate how many of those irrational correlations we have taken for granted without thinking about it.
For this we go back to 1920s, we were fresh out of the spoils and damages of World War 1 when American Tobacco Corporation realized they are missing out half the market because women smoking was frowned upon. It was a taboo. Imagine if you could sell cigarettes to the other 50% of population? They came to Edward Bernays with this problem. He called a group of women and gave them a packet of Lucky Strikes, a lighter and told them to smoke it at his signal during the July 4th Independence day parade.
Bernays, then went to the media and told them today suffragettes are going to light the torch of freedom today. Not cigarette. Not smoking. He said torch of freedom. He shifted the entire narrative by equating to women smoking to female liberation and women empowerment. Everyone who believed their cause, would now support this as well and smoke. It was one symbolic act. The press covered it widely and every newspaper in America carried this story the next day. That’s probably why you still feel that if a woman smokes, she must be powerful or important.
Some people felt a woman smoking might be a great way to get more readership. A good friend posed for this photo.
The next story is about 20 years later, when we finished up World War 2. And in this story, we have Betty Crocker, a famous instant cake-mix company. Their product was fantastic and they had really simplified cake-baking to the bare bones. You add water to their premixed powders and shove it into the over. That simple. Yet, their product never took off.
To understand the purchase selection process, they reached out to their customers - housewives. They conducted what marketing likes to call - Focus Groups. It is where one invites potential or actual customers to have an in-depth discussion on what they feel about the product. A moderator usually is present asking those annoying questions - Why did you pick this product? What were your initial thoughts when you tasted this? A very interesting insight came from this seemingly normal activity- most customers mentioned that their husbands had just returned from war and they wanted to do something ‘more’ than use an instant cake-mix to bake. They felt guilty in using Betty Crocker.
What Betty Crocker did post was probably the most amazing move in business history - They inserted “Add an egg” to the instructions on backside of the packet. That’s all it took for the sales to go up 3X!
American tobacco and Betty Crocker manipulated the perception in two completely different ways. I am not arguing if manipulation is ethical or not. We will leave that to the philosophers. Just looking at the mechanics of it, American Tobacco created a blast about their change. It was not subtle. There was almost a show that was put on which pulled everyone’s attention towards what they were doing. A big bang event with so much pizzazz. While Betty Crocker’s method was lot more subtle, almost a gentle nudge. Yet both of them addressed something deeper in their customers than their rational process. While one addressed a yearning to showcase liberation and empowerment, the other addressed an equally fundamental instinct - guilt. It goes to show how you don’t have to always spend billions to change consumer behavior. The method can be as small as a gentle nudge. In real life, our default setting is to retain our course. Any change, big or small, is frowned upon by our subconscious. Which is why there is no direct pathway. Tobacco stunt worked because to create a fundamental change in perception, you would need a big-bang event.
But not everything around you is so manipulative. Sometimes, we manipulate ourselves. Ever wondered why Starbucks has so many coffee choices where price swings by 200-300% even though the cost to make them is almost the same? Or why Starbucks offer both ‘normal’ coffee and fair-trade coffee? Ideally shouldn’t all coffee be ethically sourced or fairly traded?
When you enter Starbucks, they don’t know if you are a high-spender or low-spender. They don’t know if you are environmentally & socially conscious to pay higher for fair-trade coffee. By walking up to the counter and ordering, you are essentially signalling to be a part of a particular spending-segment. This is what we call self-selection. You raise your hand and tell Starbucks how much you want to spend for your coffee. And with that, Starbucks can make you pay what you want to rather than what you have to pay for a coffee.
Other examples of these nudges are keeping dairy products in last of the aisle in any supermarket because they know dairy is most frequently purchased product. And this would make a lot of customers walk through those aisles, make them look at those glittering packages exactly at eye-level (the shelf at the eye-level is the most expensive shelf space in any retailer) so that you’re nudged to buy something else when all you came was to buy milk. Or having no windows & clocks in casinos, keeping chocolates in supermarket at the kid’s eye-level… There are literally thousands of things brands, retailers do to nudge you to buy more yet none of which are told to you.
For a large part of our thinking, even now, we believe information drives behavior. And that humans are logical agents making rational choices. But the reality is so far from that.