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I’m reading an intriguing book called “BUY.OLOGY”. It tries to simplify the fledgling science of ‘neuro-marketing’ into case studies with simple examples.
For instance, we’ve all heard that in advertising, sex sells. A study compared viewer recall of brands in ads with explicitly sensual or sex-oriented themes – and found (surprisingly?!) that while they remembered the person (or anatomy) on display, it blurred or overshadowed the sight or image of logo, brand and product.
The simplistic conclusion: Sex does NOT sell. Unsexy ads had just as good recall as the other.
Even casual analysis of this scenario will suggest there are other variables at play. Yes, they compared two groups, one of which was wearing a cap full of wires and seated (forced to!) in front of a TV – and so, with nothing better to do, the people actually WATCHED the ad.
Would they watch an ‘unsexy’ ad at home? Or would they rather raid the fridge, take a toilet break, or just replay the program they had been viewing in their minds?!
Maybe it’s my conditioning as a medical doctor that makes me see most things in shades of gray rather than cut-and-dried black or white.
In medical school, students are taught the famous study linking coffee-drinking and cancer. A strong causal association between drinking a lot of coffee and getting lung cancer was suggested by the research data – until some smart cookie figured out that most coffee-drinkers also smoked cigarettes as they drank!
The link was actually between cigarette smoke and lung cancer. Coffee was what is called a ‘confounding variable’.
We live in a multi-variate world. No test is ’simple’. Least of all, tests involving the way people think and behave. Pseudo-scientific talk based on miniscule sample size merely clouds the issue, rather than proving anything conclusive.
Yet many of us long to be uni-dimensional in this world – just because it is EASY!
Thoughts?
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