It is certainly the hope of marketers that upon watching a commercial in which a bunch of beautiful people are enjoying a given brand of beer, we will imitate these “demonstrators.” To the extent that marketing appeals to imitation, it could be said that other animals are capable of being manipulated by “marketing.” In the case of the observer rat above, the only difference between a rodent marketing campaign for Cocoa Puffs and socially transmitted food preference is that the demonstrator rat would be getting paid by a company trying to market Cocoa Puffs to rats.
A component of advertising relies on the marketer’s ability to tap into the brain’s natural propensity for imitation and social learning. But marketing is much more intricate than simply hoping that “human see, human do.” Anybody who has watched TV for more than a few milliseconds knows that advertisements are disproportionately populated with attractive, happy, and apparently successful individuals. If we are going to imitate someone, it makes sense to imitate those who appear to be popular, successful, and desirable (homeless people rarely appear in commercials or start new trends). Cigarette commercials, for example, have historically been inhabited with young and attractive, serious and successful people, as well as representatives of prestigious and trustworthy professions. In fact, until the 1950s medical doctors often appeared in cigarette commercials. Who better than your doctor to assure you that smoking is healthy?
Do we really have an inherent proclivity to pay more attention to, and imitate, individuals higher up on the social ladder? Are other animals more likely to imitate the “successful” members of their own group? Many species have established social hierarchies in which some individuals are dominant over others. In rats, dominance can translate into first dibs on food and sexual partners. In chimpanzees, dominance translates into more food, sexual partners, and grooming privileges (and the need to have to continuously watch your back). Although the issue is not settled, a number of studies indicate that some animals are indeed more likely to observe and imitate dominant members of their group. For example, in the case of socially transmitted food preference, an observer rat is more likely to prefer the flavor of food they detect on the breath of a dominant demonstrator than on a subordinate demonstrator.11 In other words, rats, like humans, seem to prefer to eat what the upper class eats.
The primatologist Frans de Waal provides an anecdotal account of preferential imitation in a chimpanzee colony in which the dominant male had hurt his hand and was visibly limping as a result. Soon the impressionable juvenile males of the group started to imitate his limp, a form of flattery that would have been unlikely to take place if a non-dominant male had been injured.12 If primates do have a propensity to preferentially imitate the dominant individuals of a social group, it would suggest they may also have a tendency to selectively follow the lives of the rich and famous.
Indeed, this seems to be the case, as demonstrated in a clever study with rhesus monkeys. As with many other primates, these monkeys can be trained to exert their free will when they are given a choice between two options, such as grape or orange juice. The monkey is trained to hold his gaze on the center of a computer screen, and when a light goes on to shift his eyes left or right. If the monkey looks left he receives a squirt of grape juice; if he looks right he receives a squirt of orange juice. If a clear right bias is revealed over many trials, we can conclude that he likes orange over grape juice.
Investigators used a variation of this two-alternative forced choice procedure to figure out if monkeys liked looking at their counterparts. First, they gave monkeys a choice between juice if they looked one way and less juice if they looked another. Not surprisingly they exhibited a strong bias toward the bigger reward. Next they presented a low dose of juice paired with pictures of other monkeys, so if the monkey looked left it meant he’d get a lot of juice, and if he looked right he would get less juice and be shown a picture. These pictures could be just the faces of other monkeys or monkey porn (pictures of the derrieres of female monkeys). Given the choice between a lot of juice or a little juice plus a peek at some pictures, they preferred the latter. Fascinatingly, in the case of the headshots, this was only true if the pictures were of dominant males. They were willing to sacrifice some juice for a glimpse of individuals above them in the social hierarchy, but not below themselves.13 One cannot resist drawing an analogy with the fact that we humans have been known to hand over our own juice for the opportunity to look at the pictures and hear news of the rich and famous in magazines and tabloids devoted to celebrity watching. The precondition to learning from individuals higher up on the social ladder is that they have to be observed. The monkey’s willingness to forego some juice to look at dominant members of the group presumably sets the stage for social learning and preferential imitation.
Learning by observing one’s compatriots is an ability present in a number of different species. The dietary habits of one rat can be influenced by what the other members of the group are eating, and songbirds learn to perfect their songs by listening to their father. However, in both these cases it is not really the behavior that is being learned; rather, a preexisting behavior is modulated or tuned by observation. Rats that have never seen another individual eating will of course eat, and songbirds that have never heard another bird sing will sing, just not as well. In primates, and humans in particular, imitative learning is in a league of its own. Most monkeys are not going to start washing their potatoes on their own, and no child is going to learn to successfully forage in the Australian outback or speak, for that matter, without massive amounts of observation and imitation.
With some possible exceptions, true social learning of totally new behaviors is restricted to primates. And as suggested by the work of the Italian neuroscientist Giacomo Rizzolatti and others, the primate brain may have specialized neural hardware in place for imitation and social learning. In one set of experiments Rizzolatti and colleagues recorded the activity of neurons in part of the frontal cortex of awake monkeys. A challenge to those exploring the brain, particularly uncharted cortical territories, is figuring out what the neuron they are recording from does for a living—what makes it fire? One story goes that they noticed that the neuron they were recording from on one particular day started to fire when an experimenter reached to grasp an object. This initial observation eventually led to the description of a class of neurons that fire when the animal witnesses others performing some act, such as bringing a cup to one’s mouth. Amazingly, these same neurons fire when the animal performs the same act. For this reason, these neurons have been termed mirror neurons.14 The discovery of a mirror neuron system in the brain of primates provided strong support for the notion that the ability to imitate, and learn by imitation, played a critical role in human evolution, and reinforces the notion that we humans are hardwired to imitate other humans.15
The extent to which imitation is engrained into the brain of humans is easy to underestimate, not because it isn’t important, but rather because it is so important that, like breathing, it is automatic and unconscious. Without coaxing, babies imitate their parents, whether they happen to be scrubbing the floor or talking on their cell phones. Seeing someone else yawn often results in imitation, which is why we say yawning is contagious. We imitate each other’s accents; when people move from one coast to the other their original accents slowly fade away. We even unconsciously copy each others’ body posture in meetings.16 We also tend to pay closer attention to the actions of those people who share our own culture, race, and interests. Advertising agencies carefully target the actors in advertisements to their audience, so that actors in commercials aimed at selling cigarettes to black woman have little in common with those in ads targeting white men.
If we were not gifted copycats, modern culture and society would not even exist. So imitation is an invaluable brain feature, but the brain bug lies in the fact that our propensity to imitate often generalizes indiscriminately, leading to poor decisions and the opportunity for others to manipulate our be
havior for their own purposes. The monkeys that learned to wash their potatoes from the inventor of potato washing were smart enough to focus on the relevant behavior, as they did not go around imitating the tail position or fur style of the inventor. And when I imitated my fellow subway riders in the Tokyo subways I did not go out and buy a suit before purchasing my subway ticket because every other male I saw was wearing one. Similarly, when Dick Fosbury revolutionized the high jump by jumping over the bar backward in 1968, his imitators immediately copied his jumping style, not the brand of sneakers he used or the way he cut his hair. But when Michael Jordan, Ronaldinho, or Tiger Woods pitches a product, modern advertising asks us to go out and buy the underwear, laptop, or sports drink they purportedly use. Rationally, we know that Michael Jordan’s success had nothing to do with underwear—so it would seem that our propensity to purchase pitched products is more related to the whims of neural programs that evolved to encourage imitation of those further up the social ladder.
FABRICATING ASSOCIATIONS
In Chapter 4 we saw that Pavlov first demonstrated the principles of classical conditioning by burning the association between the sound of a bell and food into the brains of his dogs, by pairing the bell with food over and over again. When it comes to the world of marketing, we are all Pavlov’s dogs.
Many studies have emphasized the role of classical conditioning in marketing. The product can be interpreted as the conditioned stimulus, and those things that naturally elicit positive attitudes, such as beautiful sceneries, pleasant music, or sexy celebrities, as the unconditioned stimulus.17 However, marketing engages a complex set of stimuli, emotions, expectations, and previously acquired knowledge; it is thus debatable as to how well even the simplest forms of marketing fit into the traditional classical conditioning framework. Nevertheless, independent of the precise type of learning marketing campaigns tap into, it is clear that marketing relies in large part on the brain’s ability to create associations.18 One way to test the degree to which marketers have been successful in their goal is by playing the free association game again. What does the phrase “just do it” remind you of? If it reminds you of a sportswear company, that is because Nike has managed to configure some of the synapses in your brain.
In 1929 a woman named Bertha Hunt arranged for a group of attractive young ladies to light up cigarettes during the popular Easter Parade in New York City. At the time, smoking was largely viewed as a masculine activity, and few women smoked in public. The performance caught the attention of the press and was mentioned on the first page of The New York Times the next day.19 In an interview Bertha Hunt stated that the act was an expression of feminism, and famously called the cigarettes “torches of freedom.” While I suppose the act did represent a misstep toward equality, the gesture was not really inspired by the desire to advance the equal rights movement. Bertha Hunt was actually Edward Bernays’s secretary. Bernays had recently been hired by George Hill, the president of the American Tobacco Corporation, to address the fact that cigarettes were primarily being used by men and that there was a social taboo against smoking for women. Of course if this taboo could be reversed, the American Tobacco Company would instantly double its potential target audience. Bernays’s publicity stunt succeeded in a big way. After having linked smoking to the feminist movement in the public’s mind, and cigarettes to freedom, there was a rapid increase in cigarette sales among women.
Much of what we learn is absorbed unconsciously as a result of the brain’s tendency to link concepts that occur together. As discussed in Chapter 1 the brain organizes its semantic knowledge about the world by creating links between related concepts, and one of the main cues about whether two concepts are related to each other is whether they tend to be experienced together. Marketing taps into the brain’s propensity to build these associations but companies cannot afford to let the associations between their products and positive concepts emerge naturally; they must ensure that we experience these associations through artificial means—that is, through advertising. I “know” that Frosted Flakes are “great,” that Budweiser is “the king of beers,” and that “a diamond is forever.” But none of this “knowledge” was acquired by firsthand experience, rather it crept up on me through repetitive exposure to marketing slogans.
Studies have confirmed that pairing fictitious products with pleasant stimuli enhances the desirability of the product. In one study students were asked whether a given piece of music would be well suited for a pen advertising campaign. Half the students heard music they were likely to enjoy (“popular music”) and half heard music they were assumed to dislike (classical Indian music). While they listened to the music, they saw an image of a colored pen (blue or beige). At the end of the evaluation of the music, each student was offered a pen for participating and was allowed to choose the color (blue or beige). In other words, each student could pick the color that had been paired with the music or a “new” color. Each row in the table below shows the choices according to the music they heard.
Of the students that listened to the popular music, 78 percent picked the pen color they saw while listening to the music (blue or beige depending on their group). In contrast, only 30 percent of those who listened to the classical Indian music chose the pen color they had seen during the experiment.20
Have you ever found yourself heading toward the fridge, store, or restaurant, or perhaps even salivating, after hearing a jingle or seeing the brand name of your favorite snack? One probably does not need scientific studies to establish that the taglines, packages, and jingles companies use can be effective in shaping our purchasing habits. Nevertheless, it is useful to look at some studies of how associations can shape our tastes and perceptions. In one study subjects were first given five different flavors of liquids, and asked to rate which ones they preferred. During this phase of the experiment the subjects were in a brain scanner, which allowed the investigators to measure changes in brain activity. As the experimenters expected, activity in part of the brain involved in arousal, the ventral midbrain, was higher when the subjects tasted the flavors they liked.21 Next the subjects underwent a classical conditioning paradigm. The experimenters paired a visual image, geometric shapes of different colors that I will refer to as the logos, with each flavor. Each logo was presented for five seconds, and when the logo disappeared the subjects had one of the flavors squirted into their mouths. For example, a green star might be paired with carrot juice, and a blue circle with grapefruit juice. As you would expect, subjects learned to associate each logo with each flavor. But, they did not simply learn the conscious declarative association, such as “there’s the green star, here comes the carrot juice,” rather the images seemed to acquire some of the desirability of the preferred flavors at the unconscious level. For example, the subjects’ reaction time to press a button when the logo was presented was quicker for logos paired with the highest-rated flavors, and the activity in the ventral midbrain (measured before the delivery of the liquid) was also higher for the logo associated with the subjects’ preferred liquid. In other words, consistent with the associative architecture of the brain, arbitrary sensory stimuli took on the ability to produce neural signatures similar to those of the actual desirable objects. The subjects could be said to have developed more positive attitudes or feelings toward the logos associated with their preferred juices.
The above experiments rely on first-order associative learning: a connection is made between an initially neutral stimulus (the logo) and a pleasant stimulus (the preferred flavor). But in many cases the relationships between packages, brands, logos, taglines, and their perceived desirability are more complex; they rely on so-called second-order associations. In these instances, the “positivity” of one stimulus is transferred to another stimulus through an intermediate one. Figure 7.1 summarizes such a “transfer” experiment performed with five-year-old children. In this study neutral images, such as a square or a circle, were paired with pictures containing some meaning, such as a teddy b
ear or a crying baby. The picture of the teddy bear was meant to represent a positive stimulus (in the actual study a picture of Ernie from Sesame Street was used), while that of the crying baby a negative stimulus (since children can be unpredictable in their likes and dislikes, they were later asked which picture they liked better). The children also learned to associate the square and circle with two additional neutral icons, which again we can think of as two logos. For example, the children were taught that when they were shown a square and given the choice of picking the picture of the teddy bear or the crying baby, they should pick the teddy bear. Altogether they learned the following relationships: square teddy bear, circle crying baby; logo A square, and logo B circle. Finally, the five-year-olds were asked to choose between two bottles of the same lemonade, one labeled with logo A, the other with logo B. Ninety-one percent of the children wanted the bottle with the icon that had been paired with the picture that they liked the most (generally the teddy bear).22
You can see the relevance of these studies to our understanding of why the human brain is vulnerable to marketing. Somewhere within the brains of the children, their neural circuits formed links between square teddy bear and logo A square, creating the second-order relationship: logo A square teddy bear. After these associations were in place, when faced with deciding which bottle of lemonade to try, these links were sufficient to bias their choice toward the bottle labeled with logo A; it became their preferred “brand.” Whether the associations between brands and positive concepts are acquired through marketing, firsthand experience, or serendipity, they can influence our behavior and decisions. Let’s say I find myself in a supermarket, faced with the choice between two brands of iced tea. The prices and volume are exactly the same, and one brand is called Josu and the other Sujo. Not putting much thought into it I decide to purchase the Josu. Perhaps unconsciously Josu has a better ring to it. Perhaps it sounds cleaner to me because I know “sujo” means “dirty” in Portuguese. The words Josu and Sujo, although entirely irrelevant to the quality of the iced tea can have preexisting associations particular to each consumer. If you find yourself in New Zealand you may be disinclined to pick up the Sars soft drink, or Pee Cola if you find yourself in Ghana. Brand names are critical to marketing success, and a neutral name in one language can be loaded with negative associations in another. This is why numerous companies are exclusively devoted to coming up with names for products, and ensuring that a name is not offensive in a particular language. Note that discriminating against the Sars or Pee Cola brands is irrational; indeed I would venture they are above-average brands if they have survived despite their names, yet due to the associative architecture of the brain, it is inevitable that irrelevant associations will color our opinions and perceptions.
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