Ground-breaking Insights into How our Brains Respond to Advertising
Volume 19, Number 4 Article by Srividya Raghavan December, 2007
The Advertised Mind: Ground-breaking Insights into How our Brains Respond to Advertising : By Erik Du Plessis, 2005, Kogan Page, London, pp 256, Price: Rs. 350 :
Erik Du Plessis is the CEO of Millward Brown, an advertising and research agency in South Africa that owns one of the largest advertising research databases. He has drawn on his experience in advertising and research, his knowledge of academic research rigour as well as his passion for the field to write a book which is one of a kind. The aim of the book is to prove that advertising works, but it takes a novel perspective to accomplish its goal.
The positive role of advertising in affecting sales has been difficult to prove since there are as many failures as there are successes. However, it is true that there is a perception of its effectiveness, and that it has been accepted as an immovable fixture in the world of business. In the words of Andy Tarish2: ‘We find that advertising works the way the grass grows. You can never see it, but every week you have to mow the lawn.’
Du Plessis uses an inside-out and outside-in approach to drive home his point that advertisement works on the psyche of the consumer to ultimately modify his/her behaviour. He goes into the specifics of how advertising effects can be measured, which of the measures is better and the implications for advertisers and their agencies.
Although the book is not divided into discrete sections, the material is organised under three different aspects of advertising and its effects. The first part of the book, Chapters 1 through 9, deals with the inner dynamics of how the brain works: how we are wired to work, how this neural wiring affects our thinking and emotion and leaves an indelible mark on our psyche. The second part of the book, Chapters 10 through 14, is about how this structure and wiring of the brain affects our response to advertising. The third part, Chapters 15 through 22, then goes on to elucidate how advertisers and advertising researchers can use this understanding to get better measures of advertising impact and what can be done to improve its effectiveness. The author is adept at putting himself (and the reader) in the consumer’s shoes. This helps him build a logical argument based on an immense amount of multi-disciplinary research. These research findings are used to elucidate how emotion becomes the crux of why and how advertising works.
Neurology has added insights on ‘how we pay attention’. Combining ideas of early philosophers such as Rene Descartes and drawing on studies of artificial intelligence, the author points out the relevance of our most primitive feelings and instinctive behaviour. With the apt example of how one might perceive an innocuous twig to be a snake in a snake-infested forest, the author points to how the human mind is hard-wired in a specific way to respond to stimuli in the environment and how emotion drives cognition and controls conscious thought.
What we pay attention to is what we remember and what leaves an indelible mark in our minds. Here, the author discusses the importance of attention in the process of how memory, attention and learning work. What is attended to, in turn, is governed by emotion. Thus the role of advertising is to evoke emotion. He goes on to establish that only a positive emotion has the potential to evoke positive behaviour. This boils down to a single observation for advertising: likeability.
With an understanding of why and how ‘likeability’ might work in advertising, the author provides a potent tool for a researcher to delve into how this can be measured, proved and used in optimising the success of an advertisement. This not only has an impact on the predictability of advertising success in terms of content, it also has direct implications for how media allocation and frequency of exposure can be managed. This connects very well with the author’s surmise that it is lack of a good measure that holds back the advertisers and their agencies from proving the effectiveness of advertising. The book then details a 32-item scale (COMMAP model) and a research methodology to demonstrate how ad-liking can be measured and used in interpreting a consumer’s response.
The book stands out due to its unique, cohesive and comprehensive approach. The language is conducive to easy perusal and understanding, ensuring that the multi-disciplinary approach does not scare away the target audience who might benefit from its insights. Using an interesting approach, Du Plessis builds up a paradigm of how advertising can be made effective. The theory has its implications for the researcher, as well as the creative professional and the media planner. This insightful book can be read, understood and applied by anyone who is even remotely interested in advertising.
References
- Quoted in Bill Bernbach said…(1989), DDB Needham Worldwide. http://www.bizprofitbuilder.com/WOW.html
- A C Nielsen Company, quoted in Martin Mayer, 1991, Whatever Happened to Madison Avenue? Advertising in the ’90s, Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Company, pp 179-80.
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