brandknewmag.com
20
RULES OF MANIPULATION
Researcher Dr. Patrali Chatterjee, of Montclair State University,
has spent her career exploring how brands work their way
into our unconscious and has shown how tools like online
ads that we believe we ignore can sear their way into our
preferences.
When I show her a few ultrasounds, she’s intrigued.
“The positive warm glow you feel for your baby probably
transfers to the [GE] logo,” she says without much hesitation-which is particularly useful in my situation, she points out,
as new parents make a lot of domestic purchases (purchases
that include refrigerators and dishwashers stamped with the
GE logo). That halo effect can be so powerful, she continues,
that someone in my situation could even pay more attention
to GE commercials they see on TV.
FOR A LOGO TO HIJACK
OUR BRAINS, WE REQUIRE
MULTIPLE EXPOSURES.
But there are rules to the way these manipulations work, she
explains. For a logo to hijack our brains and hearts through
pre-attentive processing (those things we see in the corner
of our eye), we require multiple exposures to the stimulus.
Chatterjee has found this unconscious, positive association to
occur within 23 exposures, but she believes it could probably
happen in even fewer.
“When consumers process any stimulus--a logo is a brand
stimulus--implicitly it only creates a weak memory trace. The
weak memory trace by itself can’t really change behavior,”
Chatterjee explains. “But over multiple exposures, those
weak memory traces start to become stronger.”
“The consumer is unaware that those memory traces exist.
Let’s take John and Jane Doe looking at an ultrasound.
They’re looking at a picture, they’re oohing and ahhing,
showing it to their friends, talking about it, putting it in a
scrapbook. They’re focusing on the baby. They may not even
know it’s an ultrasound made by a GE machine, but they see
it multiple times.”
“Then, maybe they’re buying a new house, and so they’re
buying appliances, they go to a big-box store, they’re looking
at multiple brands. It is quite conceivable they will be more
attracted to the GE brands.”
Now for this long con to work, the logo has to be identical
everywhere I see it. That means their main logo in the corner
of the ultrasound is probably quite powerful, while the tiny
GE typed next to the baby--the ۙH ]