"Attitude is everything."
-- Plymouth
Around 1930, pioneer marketing psychologist Louis Cheskin placed an identical product in two different packages, one with circles on the outside, the other with triangles, then asked subjects which product they preferred. 80% preferred the box with the circles over the box with triangle. The reason they gave was that it was a higher-quality product than the box with the triangle--even though the contents were identical.Hine reports that Cheskin's experiment has been repeated year after year in countless variations and writes "despite increasing consumer sophistication about marketing tactics, despite defensiveness and cynicism, it still works."Cheskin varied the test. He gave subjects the two cartons and asked them to predict, before trying the product, which one would be better. They preferred the product with the circles by a similar margin. Then he asked them to try the product and indicate their preference. Their actual preferences differed from their predictions by less than 2 percent. He names this phenomenon "sensation transference."
Another example:
An identical underarm deodorant was mailed out to a test group in three different packages in which the color combinations were varied. The subjects were told that the deodorants were three different formulations under consideration and were asked to judge each of the three formulations. In such three-way tests, it's common for consumers to play Goldilocks to the Three Bears. In this case, that's exactly what they did: color-scheme B was considered "just right." It was praised for its pleasant, unobtrusive fragrance and ability to stop wetness and odor for as many as 12 hours. Color-scheme C was found to have a strong aroma but not really much effectiveness. And color-scheme A was downright scary; several users developed skin rashes after using it and three had severe enough problems to consult dermatologists.
Attitude is packaging.
Hine goes on to document more contemporary examples of the same basic idea.
He gives time to color analysis, auditory response, psychological responses, how the placement of a word, a particular font or inflection of voice can dramatically
affect sales, etc. For anyone familiar with the advertising industry's reliance on focus
group research, sensory perception, and test marketing this is old news.
But The One to One Future takes the sell to a new extreme. The product is practically irrelevant. As the authors says, producing, distributing, advertising, promoting and selling products are intermediate steps: the ultimate purpose of a business is to create customers and keep them. Savvy companies will focus not on product management but customer management. It's the difference between creating soap and creating soap buyers, a divide that deepens when what's at stake isn't just soap but education, medical care, or art.
Advertisers aren't just going around brainwashing people. The process is much more complex. We interact with media, creatively read them, cry through bullshit where we find it; we also project much of ourselves onto products, sometimes giving them qualities they don't have, personalities, blah blah. All the more reason to try and strip away the bullshit, to think critically about what we're really buying, AND to act defensively.
