How does your advertising drive decisions?
I had an early morning yesterday. Looming over my head was a deadline to get some new ad copy written and a marketing strategy I needed to finish. I put coffee on and began working before my family started to wake. An hour into research and writing I got up for some fresh coffee and I stopped to eat birthday cake for breakfast. (Oh, don’t criticize – you have done it too!)
For me, this is a bit out of character – I don’t really like cake. I don’t like sugar for breakfast. I am currently in training mode, so I am watching what I eat. Birthday cake for breakfast just doesn’t fit into my world right now.
Chalk it up to stress? Not so fast….
On the way to my first meeting of the day, I heard a compelling story on NPR, “Will Power and The Slacker Brain.” (listen to the story here!)
The story is about a research project that is also reviewed in the Wall Street Journal and in the book “How We Decide.” It is the story of how people make good and bad decisions. This is an excerpt from the Wall Street Journal:
In one experiment, led by Baba Shiv at Stanford University, several dozen undergraduates were divided into two groups. One group was given a two-digit number to remember, while the second group was given a seven-digit number. Then they were told to walk down the hall, where they were presented with two different snack options: a slice of chocolate cake or a bowl of fruit salad.
Here’s where the results get weird. The students with seven digits to remember were nearly twice as likely to choose the cake as students given two digits. The reason, according to Prof. Shiv, is that those extra numbers took up valuable space in the brain—they were a “cognitive load”—making it that much harder to resist a decadent dessert. In other words, willpower is so weak, and the prefrontal cortex is so overtaxed, that all it takes is five extra bits of information before the brain starts to give in to temptation.
AHA! Now we know why I ate cake for breakfast!
Is this good news for marketers of sweet treats and alcoholic beverages? If your audience is already in-store, can you over stimulate the brain to breakdown willpower and encourage excess purchases? What about moving people to action whom you are targeting to purchase a gym membership or make an appointment for a cardiac score? At the point of purchase “de-clutter” the messages they hear and see. Keep things simple so they can make the right, healthy decisions.
What do you think? What experience do you have making decisions or purchases when your willpower was broken down? How can you parlay this information about the working mind into your marketing plan?
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