Of all the marketing courses I studied, my favorite was Consumer Behavior – understanding what makes people tick, and how that ticking leads them to buy some things, while not others.
Of the factors that shapes the psychology of buying (e.g. attitudes, motivators, culture, lifestyle) the one I find most intriguing is perception – how our senses interpret the world. As it turns out, there are two things about our perceptions that make a marketer’s job interesting.
First, people don’t perceive the same thing the same way. Trial lawyers know this as well as anyone. As do TV viewers who watch baseball umpires and Olympic figure skating judges make their calls.
Consider the food and beverage industry. Marketers new to the business quickly learn that what tastes sickeningly sweet to one person is “just right” to another. One of the reasons for the success of Coca-Cola is its lack of taste memory. The taste of other beverage products – and many foods – are “sticky”, i.e. it accumulates and stays with us. Not so with Coca-Cola – which is why people can drink a half a dozen Cokes every day and never grow tired of the product.
A simple illustration of how two people can perceive the same thing differently comes courtesy of the Necker cube and the Rubin vase. You’ve likely seen these illusions before. The mind interprets each of them in two distinct, yet perfectly valid, ways. (This video shows why the Necker cube illusion works).
This partially explains why, no matter how good or well-differentiated a product is, there will always be competition for it. It is also why product ratings on Amazon with 5-star ratings can have a fair share of 1-star ratings. Universal brand acceptance is a lofty, but unattainable, goal for marketers.
Second, the conclusions we draw about events are shaped by our expectations of them. If this were not so, magicians would not be able to put illusion and misdirection to work in their acts. The “magic” comes from our brains perceiving the occurrence of events that we otherwise know to be impossible.
To understand what this means to marketers, let’s stay with our food and beverage example. Die-hard brand loyalists (e.g. those who drink Coca-Cola and nothing else) fail miserably when it comes to correctly identifying their beverage of choice in blind taste tests. Put another cola in a Coke-branded bottle, and most people will likewise fail to taste the deception. It says Coca-Cola on the bottle, so our brains convince us that is what we are drinking.
Here is a video of an especially convincing optical illusion that illustrates that things are not always what they seem. Our experience and expectations tell us one thing, but reality can be surprisingly different.
In his 1979 Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Douglas Hofstadter devoted a considerable portion of the book to the work of artist M.S. Escher, an example of whose work below may be familiar.
Escher devoted much of his work to recursive art – illustrations in which the main objects refer back to themselves in ways that are impossibly contradictory to us. His art works because our brains tell us what to expect, yet the reality we experience does not match it. We are confused, puzzled, and intrigued – all at the same time.
That our brains work this way explains why cheap imitation counterfeit products can often fare well in the market (the – sadly – dark side of marketing) and why some products, no matter how technically good – or even superior – they might be, do a face-plant in the market. Consider the Betamax and HD DVD video formats – if you even remember them.
Though these are complex matters, the following illusions illustrate how easy it is for the mind to interpret reality differently.
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