THE HISTORY OF EMOTIONS, THE BRAIN AND THE BRAND
Why talk about history in a story about the future?
I tell my students, when they ask this question, that unless one understand the history one cannot evaluate the import of things that are happening in the present nor how the present will affect the past.
This is one of those philosophical statements that older people often make just so that what they remember seems important.
The real reason for understanding the past, I also tell my students, is that when they start to work they will find many people saying things that sound convincing, but are old paradigms. There are many urban legends about the brain and about advertising in particular, these abounds and are very often repeated in board rooms where they become the basis of decision-making.
It is much better to warn my students so they have an open mind.
In this history overview I will limit myself largely to things that involve the brain-brand interaction and especially emotions.
This will only involve some ‘marketing’ names. Marketing (and Consumer Behavior) is itself an endeavor that relies on views expressed by psychologists, philosophers, economists, statisticians, sociologists, quacks, and now neurologists.
I also explained in the introductory sections that there are many disciplines involved in the study of the brain, and I have to include many of these disciplines in my historical overview.
BBC2 produce a documentary titled ‘A Century of the Self’ available from amazon.com and really worth getting.
It is the story of advertising from 1900 through to why Tony Blair was moved out and the end of George Bush’s term in office.
The underlying theme is that advertising evolved as society evolved, as psychology evolved, as the political climate evolved, and as the economic situations changed, etc.
Aristotle draws a clear distinction between emotions and the rational in legal arguments and the morality of using emotions to achieve objectives that should only be achieved by rational arguments. This remains a principle in most legal systems.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
René Descartes (March 31, 1596 – February 11, 1650), was a highly influential French philosopher, mathematician, scientist, and writer. He has been dubbed the "Father of Modern Philosophy" and the "Father of Modern Mathematics", and much of subsequent Western philosophy is a reaction to his writings, which have been closely studied from his time down to the present day. His influence in mathematics is also apparent, the Cartesian coordinate system that is used in plane geometry and algebra being named for him, and he was one of the key figures in the Scientific Revolution.
Descartes frequently sets his views apart from those of his predecessors. In the opening section of the Passions of the Soul, a treatise on the Early Modern version of what are now commonly called emotions, he goes so far as to assert that he will write on his topic "as if no one had written on these matters before".
Many elements of his philosophy have precedents in late Aristotelianism, the revived Stoicism of the 16th century, or in earlier philosophers like St. Augustine. In his natural philosophy, he differs from the Schools on two major points: first, he rejects the analysis of corporeal substance into matter and form; second, he rejects any appeal to ends—divine or natural—in explaining natural phenomena. In his theology, he insists on the absolute freedom of God’s act of creation.
Descartes was a major figure in 17th century continental rationalism, later advocated by Baruch Spinoza and Gottfried Leibniz, and opposed by the empiricist school of thought consisting of Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume.
Leibniz, Spinoza and Descartes were all versed in mathematics as well as philosophy, and Descartes and Leibniz contributed greatly to science as well. As the inventor of the Cartesian coordinate system, Descartes founded analytic geometry, the bridge between algebra and geometry, crucial to the invention of calculus and analysis.
Descartes's reflections on mind and mechanism began the strain of western thought that much later, impelled by the invention of the electronic computer and by the possibility of machine intelligence, blossomed into the Turing test and related thought.
His most famous statement is: Cogito ergo sum (French: Je pense, donc je suis; English: I think, therefore I am), found in §7 of part I of Principles of Philosophy (Latin) and in part IV of Discourse on the Method (French).
In talks at conferences I often amuse people by telling them how Descartes viewed the brain:
He postulated that in the brain there is a small human being which he called a Homunculus (latin for ‘little man’). This little man sees through the eyes, listen trough the ears etc. This became known as the Cartesian Theatre. This little man had a lot of levers (like a crane operator) through which he manipulated the arms, legs etc.. The instructions to the muscles were promulgated via the nerves in liquid form. Vitae (the juices of live) are pumped through the nerves to pump up the muscles and cause motion. He also concluded that we never find the homunculus in dead people’s brains because he disintegrates into a grey pulpy substance when he is dead.
This description amuses audiences. Until I remind them that at that time no-one knew about electricity. Which means that nerves had no real function, and his description of how vitae pumps up muscles was a few hundred years before its time!
Probably everybody with an education has heard: Cogito ergo sum. The English I think, therefore I am should be read by students of this book to read: I am rational, therefore I am. And one can even read this as ‘I am logical’ or ‘I am rational’ or even ‘I think about products in terms of their functionality’.
After Descartes the role of emotion was delegated to ‘something that interferes with rationality’.
A useful mnemonic would be:
RATIONAL IRRATIONAL EMOTIONAL
It is not often that Adam smith is mentioned in marketing texts, but he is a very important influence as far as understanding feelings versus rationality. He is considered to be the father of economic theory. And let’s be honest: Economic Theory is the basis of all marketing theory in terms of pricing and benefits derived from the brand.
Classical Economic theory states: If a product shortage occurs its price rises, creating a profit margin that creates an incentive for others to enter production, eventually curing the shortage. If too many producers enter the market, the increased competition among manufacturers and increased supply would lower the price of the product to its production cost, the "natural price" .
This is based on the Homo economicus (he did not use this term, but it is generally understood to be what he was talking about).
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
“Homo economicus is a term used for an approximation or model of Homo sapiens that acts to obtain the highest possible well-being for himself given available information about opportunities and other constraints, both natural and institutional, on his ability to achieve his predetermined goals. This approach has been formalized in certain social science models, particularly in economics.
Homo economicus is seen as "rational" in the sense that well-being as defined by the utility function is optimized given perceived opportunities.” (from wikipedia).
The way this Homo economicus makes decisions (product/brand choices) is based on the utility he derives from the various products compared to their prices:
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
“In economics, utility is a measure of the relative satisfaction from or desirability of consumption of various goods and services. Given this measure, one may speak meaningfully of increasing or decreasing utility, and thereby explain economic behavior in terms of attempts to increase one's utility. For illustrative purposes, changes in utility are sometimes expressed in units called utils.
The doctrine of utilitarianism saw the maximization of utility as a moral criterion for the organization of society. According to utilitarians, such as Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) and John Stuart Mill (1806-1876), society should aim to maximize the total utility of individuals, aiming for "the greatest happiness for the greatest number".
In neoclassical economics, rationality is precisely defined in terms of imputed utility-maximizing behavior under economic constraints. As a hypothetical behavioral measure, utility does not require attribution of mental states suggested by "happiness", "satisfaction", etc.” (from wikipedia)
There are two aspects of Adam Smith that is important to my story:
· He assumes a Homo Economicus, i.e. that people are rational. This is generally assumed to mean that you are not making decisions based on emotional motivations (or irrational motivations).
· He also assumes that everybody is fully informed. Not only the supplier (in our case the marketer), but also the consumer.
No wonder economics is sometimes called the dismal science if it excludes mental states of happiness and satisfaction.
Best known for his views on evolution, which he published in 1859 in “The origin of the Species”,
I will not delve on his contributions, but I do feel one should refer to him just so that the reader can see at what time in history Darwin became an influence – and also the fact that he studied emotions.
There are two issues about James that impact on my story. The obvious one is his speculation about emotions (and his famous question about why we run from a bear). The second, and less obvious, contribution by James is his views on beliefs. The reader will recognize some of his thinking when I describe what Neuro-economists are doing today.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
William James wrote voluminously throughout his life. A fairly complete bibliography of his writings by John McDermott is 47 pages long.
He gained widespread recognition with his monumental Principles of Psychology (1890), twelve hundred pages in two volumes which took twelve years to complete. Psychology: The Briefer Course, was an 1892 abridgement designed as a less rigorous introduction to the field. These works criticized both the English associationist school and the Hegelianism of his day as competing dogmatisms of little explanatory value, and sought to re-conceive of the human mind as inherently purposive and selective.
James went on to apply the pragmatic method to the epistemological problem of truth. He would seek the meaning of 'true' by examining how the idea functioned in our lives.
A belief was true, he said, if in the long run it worked for all of us, and guided us expeditiously through our semihospitable world.
James was anxious to uncover what true beliefs amounted to in human life, what their "Cash Value" was, what consequences they led to.
A belief was not a mental entity which somehow mysteriously corresponded to an external reality if the belief were true. Beliefs were ways of acting with reference to a precarious environment, and to say they were true was to say they guided us satisfactorily in this environment.
In this sense the pragmatic theory of truth applied Darwinian ideas in philosophy; it made survival the test of intellectual as well as biological fitness.
If what was true was what worked, we can scientifically investigate religion's claim to truth in the same manner. The enduring quality of religious beliefs throughout recorded history and in all cultures gave indirect support for the view that such beliefs worked. James also argued directly that such beliefs were satisfying — they enabled us to lead fuller, richer lives and were more viable than their alternatives. Religious beliefs were expedient in human existence, just as scientific beliefs were.
From Joseph LeDoux's description of William James' Emotion
Why do we run away if we notice that we are in danger? Because we are afraid of what will happen if we don't. This obvious (and incorrect) answer to a seemingly trivial question has been the central concern of a century-old debate about the nature of our emotions.
It all began in 1884 when William James published an article titled "What Is an Emotion?" The article appeared in a philosophy journal called Mind, as there were no psychology journals yet. It was important, not because it definitively answered the question it raised, but because of the way in which James phrased his response.
He conceived of an emotion in terms of a sequence of events that starts with the occurrence of an arousing stimulus {the sympathetic nervous system or the parasympathetic nervous system}; and ends with a passionate feeling, a conscious emotional experience. A major goal of emotion research is still to elucidate this stimulus-to-feeling sequence—to figure out what processes come between the stimulus and the feeling.
James set out to answer his question by asking another: do we run from a bear because we are afraid or are we afraid because we run? He proposed that the obvious answer, that we run because we are afraid, was wrong, and instead argued that we are afraid because we run:
Our natural way of thinking about... emotions is that the mental perception of some fact excites the mental affection called emotion, and that this latter state of mind gives rise to the bodily expression. My thesis on the contrary is that the bodily changes follow directly the PERCEPTION of the exciting fact, and that our feeling of the same changes as they occur is the emotion (called 'feeling' by Damasio).
The essence of James' proposal was simple. It was premised on the fact that emotions are often accompanied by bodily responses (racing heart, tight stomach, sweaty palms, tense muscles, and so on; sympathetic nervous system) and that we can sense what is going on inside our body much the same as we can sense what is going on in the outside world.
According to James, emotions feel different from other states of mind because they have these bodily responses that give rise to internal sensations, and different emotions feel different from one another because they are accompanied by different bodily responses and sensations. For example, when we see James' bear, we run away. During this act of escape, the body goes through a physiological upheaval: blood pressure rises, heart rate increases, pupils dilate, palms sweat, muscles contract in certain ways (evolutionary, innate defense mechanisms).
Other kinds of emotional situations will result in different bodily upheavals. In each case, the physiological responses return to the brain in the form of bodily sensations, and the unique pattern of sensory feedback gives each emotion its unique quality.
Fear feels different from anger or love because it has a different physiological signature {the parasympathetic nervous system for love}.
The mental aspect of emotion, the feeling, is a slave to its physiology, not vice versa: we do not tremble because we are afraid or cry because we feel sad; we are afraid because we tremble and are sad because we cry.
The reader will now also understand why I chose to start my story with a description of the neurology of feelings, etc. and then introduce the history of feelings. Without an understanding of the biology just reading the last paragraph above would have sounded like mere speculation by William James – which it was. With the modern biological insight of how an emotion is created it is amazing how close to the truth James’ speculation was.
On my website www.erikdup.com I have a copy of Prof. Damasio’s
Not much happened that is interesting until Sigmund Freud happened.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
“After opening his own medical practice, specializing in neurology, Freud married Martha Bernays in 1886. Her father Berman was the son of Isaac Bernays, chief rabbi in
After experimenting with hypnosis on his neurotic patients, Freud abandoned this form of treatment as it proved ineffective for many, in favor of a treatment where the patient talked through his or her problems.
This came to be known as the "talking cure", as the ultimate goal of this talking was to locate and release powerful emotional energy that had initially been rejected, and imprisoned in the unconscious mind.
Freud called this denial of emotions "repression", and he believed that it was often damaging to the normal functioning of the psyche, and could also retard physical functioning as well, which he described as "psychosomatic" symptoms.
(The term "talking cure" was initially coined by the patient Anna O. who was treated by Freud's colleague Josef Breuer.) The "talking cure" is widely seen as the basis of psychoanalysis.”
I must admit up-front that I am not a great fan of Freud and his theories. I am especially negative because a lot of his theories are applied willy-nilly to advertising and market research without any real consideration of the implications.
It is especially market researchers that argue for the implications of the sub-conscious as far as brand choice and advertising effect is concerned that upsets me. In fact, I think that Freud had many very valid viewpoints, but that pop-psycho-researchers present these in ways that will make Freud turn in his grave.
To not present a personal (negative) view I have chosen to take large quotes out of Wikipedia to introduce ‘Freud by the experts’.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
“The goal of Freudian therapy, or psychoanalysis, was to bring to consciousness repressed thoughts and feelings in order to free the patient from the suffering caused by the repetitive return of distorted forms of these thoughts and feelings.
Classically, the bringing of unconscious thoughts and feelings to consciousness is brought about by encouraging the patient to talk in free association and to talk about dreams. Another important element of psychoanalysis is a relative lack of direct involvement on the part of the analyst, which is meant to encourage the patient to project thoughts and feelings onto the analyst. Through this process, transference, the patient can reenact and resolve repressed conflicts, especially childhood conflicts with (or about) parents.
“Perhaps the most significant contribution Freud made to Western thought was his arguments concerning the importance of the unconscious mind in understanding conscious thought and behavior.
However, as psychologist Jacques Van Rillaer pointed out, "contrary to what most people believe, the unconscious was not discovered by Freud. In 1890, when psychoanalysis was still unheard of, William James, in his monumental treatise on psychology, examined the way Schopenhauer, von Hartmann, Janet, Binet and others had used the term 'unconscious' and 'subconscious'".
“Freud called dreams the "royal road to the unconscious". This meant that dreams illustrate the "logic" of the unconscious mind. Freud developed his first topology of the psyche in The Interpretation of Dreams (1899) in which he proposed that the unconscious exists and described a method for gaining access to it.
The preconscious was described as a layer between conscious and unconscious thought; its contents could be accessed with a little effort.
“One key factor in the operation of the unconscious is "repression." Freud believed that many people "repress" painful memories deep into their unconscious mind. Although Freud later attempted to find patterns of repression among his patients in order to derive a general model of the mind, he also observed that repression varies among individual patients.
Freud also argued that the act of repression did not take place within a person's consciousness. Thus, people are unaware of the fact that they have buried memories or traumatic experiences.
Later, Freud distinguished between three concepts of the unconscious: the descriptive unconscious, the dynamic unconscious, and the system unconscious.
The descriptive unconscious referred to all those features of mental life of which people are not subjectively aware.
The dynamic unconscious, a more specific construct, referred to mental processes and contents which are defensively removed from consciousness as a result of conflicting attitudes.
The system unconscious denoted the idea that when mental processes are repressed, they become organized by principles different from those of the conscious mind, such as condensation and displacement.
Eventually, Freud abandoned the idea of the system unconscious, replacing it with the concept of the Ego, super-ego, and id. Throughout his career, however, he retained the descriptive and dynamic conceptions of the unconscious. (source wikipedia)
The Century of Self’ really brings home that to understand Freud one must understand the times he lived in and also his view of people. The movie explains the massive influence Freud had on advertising thinking and still has.
Freud was a subscriber to the paradigm of Descartes, believing that ideally we should live as rational beings and emotions (like irrational fears) impact on our ability to behave rationally. Therefore we need treatment for our emotions.
Freud’s disciples popularized the idea of therapy sessions. It is especially group therapy sessions that became popular in the 1960’s and was the forerunner of what we now call focus groups.
(I have done a lot of focus groups in my research career and found them extremely useful as a research tool, but when done without the psycho-babble.)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs is a theory in psychology that Abraham Maslow proposed in his 1943 paper A Theory of Human Motivation, which he subsequently extended to include his observations of humans' innate curiosity.
Maslow studied exemplary people such as Albert Einstein, Jane Addams, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Frederick Douglass rather than mentally ill or neurotic people, writing that "the study of crippled, stunted, immature, and unhealthy specimens can yield only a cripple psychology and a cripple philosophy." Maslow also studied the healthiest one percent of the college student population.
Maslow's hierarchy of needs is often depicted as a pyramid consisting of five levels: the four lower levels are grouped together as being associated with physiological needs, while the top level is termed growth needs associated with psychological needs. Deficiency needs must be met first. Once these are met, seeking to satisfy growth needs drives personal growth.
The higher needs in this hierarchy only come into focus when the lower needs in the pyramid are satisfied. Once an individual has moved upwards to the next level, needs in the lower level will no longer be prioritized. If a lower set of needs is no longer being met, the individual will temporarily re-prioritize those needs by focusing attention on the unfulfilled needs, but will not permanently regress to the lower level. For instance, a businessman (at the esteem level) who is diagnosed with cancer will spend a great deal of time concentrating on his health (physiological needs), but will continue to value his work performance (esteem needs) and will likely return to work during periods of remission.
The reader should go to wikipedia where the higher order needs are discussed, in this section we concentrate on the very basic physiological needs.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The first four layers of the pyramid are what Maslow called "deficiency needs" or "D-needs": the individual does not feel anything if they are met, but feel anxious if they are not met. The deficiency needs are: Physiological, Safety needs, Love/Belonging, and Esteem needs.
These are the basic animal needs for such things as food, warmth, shelter, sex, water, and other body needs. If a person is hungry or thirsty or his body is chemically unbalanced, all of his energies turn toward remedying these deficiencies, and other needs remain inactive. Maslow explains that, "Anyone who attempts to make an emergency picture into a typical one, and who will measure all of man's goals and desires by his behavior during extreme physiological deprivation, is certainly blind to many things. It is quite true that man lives by bread alone — when there is no bread".
The physiological needs of the organism (those enabling homeostasis) take first precedence. These consist mainly of:
· Excretion
· Eating
· Sex
· Drinking
· Sleeping
· Shelter
· Warmth
If some needs are not fulfilled, a human's physiological needs take the highest priority. Physiological needs can control thoughts and behaviors, and can cause people to feel sickness, pain, and discomfort.
With his physical needs relatively satisfied, the individual's safety needs take over and dominate his behavior. These needs have to do with man's yearning for a predictable, orderly world in which injustice and inconsistency are under control, the familiar frequent, and the unfamiliar rare. In the world of work, these safety needs manifest themselves in such things as a preference for job security, grievance procedures for protecting the individual from unilateral authority, savings accounts, insurance policies, and the like.
For the most part physiological and safety needs are reasonably well satisfied in our affluent and relatively lawful society. The obvious exceptions, of course, are people outside the mainstream — the poor, the disadvantaged, and members of minority groups. If frustration has not led to apathy and weakness, such people still struggle to satisfy the basic physiological and safety needs. They are primarily concerned with survival: obtaining adequate food, clothing, shelter, and seeking justice from the dominant societal groups.
Safety needs include:
· Personal security from crime
· Security against company lay-offs
· Health and well-being
· Safety net against accidents/illness and the adverse impacts
Ultimately 90% of the brands that readers will come across operate on the lower two levels of this pyramid. Many of these might be positioned by the marketer as ALSO operating on the third level. In other words: a brand of soap operates on the SAFETY level, but might be positioned as also operating on the LOVE\BELONGING level.
The fact that a brand might be positioned to operate on the higher levels does not reduce the fact that it is operating on the lower levels.
It is very difficult, unless you were a psychologist back before the 1960’s, to really understand how much science denied the role of emotions.
Demonstrating a different point Oatley and Jenkins in Understanding Emotions describe Hebbs work with chimpanzees, but this story really demonstrates a point that fits very well into my story about emotions, and especially the understanding of emotions:
I have quoted this experiment before – maybe I should move it here?
1950 – Ernest Dichter : Motivational Research
Motivational research comprises of a number of techniques, the most common being focus groups and depth interviews. It was popularized by Dichter first in the
Dichter became a `brand' in 1950s
These techniques are still very popular research approaches used today. The claim is still made that they get to the real (or hidden) reasons people buy brands. Generally this is now called qualitative research, rather than motivational research, and is the opposite of quantitative techniques.
Unfortunately a degree of distrust (even dislike?) has developed between qualies and quanties over the years.
My view is that a researcher should not claim to be a qualitative researcher or a quantitative researcher – these are both tools of the same trade. It is like a gardener claiming to be a shears man and not a spade man.
I have found it very useful to combine qualitative and quantitative studies. Either doing the qualitative component before or after the quantitative component.
Unfortunately this happens less often than what it should because qualitative and quantitative researchers seldom reside inside the same company, and therefore seldom become friends.
It is often argued that they do not work in the same company due to them being different types of people. Having run a big research company I believe the difference is more to do with the type of work they do: qualitative people work in the evenings and come to the office late in the morning which leads to envy from the office people that have regular hours.
Since a lot of what is done by qualitative people derive from Dichter, and hence Freud, they are firmly of the view that decisions are more driven by emotional than rational reasons (and they often make the implicit assumption that quantitative researchers believe that decisions are only driven by rational reasons.)
Since the Damassio paradigm is that emotions creates rationality and that decisions are therefore a blend of these it is my hope that the two research techniques will drift closer. This will greatly benefit brands and researchers.
The birth of the ‘marketing mix’ and the 4 P’s of marketing. This is probably the date that should be considered to be the ‘birth of marketing’, at least as a formalized discipline.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
In the early 1960's, Professor Neil Borden at
The Fishbein model is also known as the multi-attribute model and some people refer to it as the multi-association model.
Simplistically it assumes that if you can have people rate a brand (or associate it with) attributes, and if you know what the value of each attribute is then you can determine an overall score which is there attitude to the brand (likelihood to buy).
Ao=[SUM]BiEi
where:
Ao = the overall attitude toward object o
Bi = the strength of the belief that object o has some particular attribute i
Ei = the evaluation of the goodness or badness of attribute i
It is obvious how this model derives from Adam Smith’s theories of utility. In fact the term Ao is often referred to as the brands utility.
Over the years a lot of work has been done on this model using different mathematical funtions (rather than mere summing), trying out options of only using the top n important attributes to predict etc. Most of these have had some predictability.
The two main problems are:
1. The attributes in a study is often correlated, especially the important ones, and this leads to double counting in the above formula. This can be removed by factor analysis, but,
2. The model should be done at a respondent level (micro-modeling) and it is impossible to remove correlation at a respondent level.
This still remains the foundation for many brand equity evaluation models. Specifically those that conclude: If you increase your brands perception on attribute (i) then the value will increase by $x.
Obviously the Fishbein model is the extreme of rational views of how consumers make decisions.
Amazingly, to this day, there exists the common belief that the brain hemispheres specialize in emotion/creativity on the right side and rationality/logic on the left side. Pop-psychologists and others present these concepts to this day in training programs for companies, and consultants exploit this misconception.
All of this is based on the paradigm of emotion-versus-rationality, and especially on a misperception of the work done Walcott Sperry (a neurologist) with split brain patients.
Again, because the pop-culture around this issue is so widely believed I will refer to Wikipedia.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
“Roger Wolcott Sperry (August 20, 1913 – April 17, 1994) was a neuropsychologist, neurobiologist and Nobel laureate who, together with David Hunter Hubel and Torsten Nils Wiesel, won the 1981 Nobel Prize in Medicine for his work with split-brain research.
“Before Sperry's experiments, some research evidence seemed to indicate that areas of the brain were largely undifferentiated and interchangeable. In his early experiments, Sperry showed that the opposite was true: after early development, circuits of the brain are largely hardwired.
In his Nobel-winning work, Sperry tested ten patients who had undergone an operation developed in 1940 by William Van Wagenen, a neurosurgeon in
The surgery, designed to treat epileptics with intractable grand mal seizures, involves severing the corpus callosum, the area of the brain used to transfer signals between the right and left hemispheres. Sperry and his colleagues tested these patients with tasks that were known to be dependent on specific hemispheres of the brain and demonstrated that the two halves of the brain may each contain consciousness.
In his words, each hemisphere is indeed a conscious system in its own right, perceiving, thinking, remembering, reasoning, willing, and emoting, all at a characteristically human level, and . . . both the left and the right hemisphere may be conscious simultaneously in different, even in mutually conflicting, mental experiences that run along in parallel —Roger Wolcott Sperry, 1974
This research contributed greatly to understanding the lateralization of brain function. In 1989, Sperry also received the National Medal of Science.
These findings, somehow, became popularized into people being left brain or right brain, and therefore being either emotional/creative or logical/rational. I will continue this story into Krugmans thoughts later.
Lets look at the modern view:
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Broad generalizations are often made in popular psychology about certain function (eg. logic, creativity) being lateralised, that is, located in the right or left side of the brain.
These ideas need to be treated carefully because the popular lateralizations are often distributed across both sides.
In many instances, the focus of the laterization entails functions attributable to very specific brain regions and in other instances distributed activations associated with more than one brain region.
However, there is some division of mental processing.
Researchers have been investigating to what extent areas of the brain are specialized for certain functions. If a specific region of the brain is injured or destroyed, their functions can sometimes be recovered by neighboring brain regions — even opposite hemispheres. This depends more on the age and the damage occurred than anything else.
The best evidence of lateralization for one specific ability is language. Both of the major areas involved in language skills, Broca's area and Wernicke's area, are in the left hemisphere. Perceptual information from the eyes, ears, and rest of the body is sent to the opposite hemisphere, and motor information sent out to the body also comes from the opposite hemisphere (see also primary sensory areas).
Neuropsychologists (e.g. Roger Sperry, Michael Gazzaniga) have studied split-brain patients to better understand lateralization. Sperry pioneered the use of lateralized tachistoscopes to present visual information to one hemisphere or the other. Scientists have also studied people born without a corpus callosum to determine specialization of brain hemispheres.
The magnocellular pathway of the visual system sends more information to the right hemisphere, while the parvocellular pathway sends more information to the left hemisphere.
There are higher levels of the neurotransmitter norepinephrine on the right and higher levels of dopamine on the left. There is more white-matter (longer axons) on right and more grey-matter (cell bodies) on the left.
Linear reasoning functions of language such as grammar and word production are often lateralized to the left hemisphere of the brain.
In contrast, holistic reasoning functions of language such as intonation and emphasis are often lateralized to the right hemisphere of the brain.
Other integrative functions such as intuitive or heuristic arithmetic, binaural sound localization, emotions, etc. seem to be more bilaterally controlled.
In summary, and see the first sentence of the above quote, one should be very careful of any views that indicate rational versus anything being part of the brain lateralization.
As far as this book is concerned the very last sentence is the most important: emotions and heuristic decisions are not the functions of a specific side of the brain.
Any marketing theories that imply a great distinction between emotions and rationality are firmly in the arena of Descartes. Even if one want to assume that the different hemispheres have a different importance for emotions and rationality then one must remember the biggest nerve bundle in the brain is the corpus collosum, which connect the two hemispheres and therefore it is very seldom that something happens in only one side.
I THINK I REPEAT EVERYTHING HERE - MERGE
Left-brain-Right-brain theories
[1]
Xxx said: “ “ (from Adv. mind)
Wikipedia has a more moderate view, but nonetheless warns against the way these theories have been popularised.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Lateralization of brain function
The human brain is separated by a longitudinal fissure, separating the brain into two distinct cerebral hemispheres connected by the corpus callosum. The two sides of the brain are similar in appearance, and every structure in each hemisphere is generally mirrored on the other side. Despite these strong similarities, the functions of each cortical hemisphere are different.
Broad generalizations are often made in popular psychology about certain function (eg. logic, creativity) being lateralised, that is, located in the right or left side of the brain. These ideas need to be treated carefully because the popular lateralizations are often distributed across both sides. However, there is some division of mental processing. Probably most fundamental to brain lateralization is the fact that the lateral sulcus is generally longer in the left hemisphere than in the right hemisphere. Researchers have been investigating to what extent areas of the brain are specialized for certain functions. If a specific region of the brain is injured or destroyed, their functions can sometimes be recovered by neighboring brain regions - even opposite hemispheres. This depends more on the age and the damage occurred than anything else.
It is important to note that—while functions are indeed lateralized—these lateralizations are trends and do not apply to every person in every case. Short of having undergone a hemispherectomy (the removal of an entire cerebral hemisphere) there are no "left-brained only" or "right-brained only" people.
Lateralization of brain functions is evident in the phenomena of right- or left-handedness, -earedness and -eyedness. But the handedness of a person is by no means a clear indication of location of brain function. While 95% of right handers have their language functions in the left hemisphere, only 18.8% of left-handers have their language function lateralized in the right hemisphere. Additionally, 19.8% of left-handers even have bilateral language functions.
Brain hemispheric theories were really started by Dr’s Sperry and Gazzaniga:
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Research by Michael Gazzaniga and Roger Wolcott Sperry in the 1960s on split-brain patients led to an even greater understanding of functional laterality. Split-brain patients are patients who have undergone corpus callosotomy (usually as a treatment for severe epilepsy), a severing of a large part of the corpus callosum. The corpus callosum connects the two hemispheres of the brain and allows them to communicate. When these connections are cut, the two halves of the brain have a reduced capacity to communicate with each other. This led to many interesting behavioral phenomena that allowed Gazzaniga and Sperry to study the contributions of each hemisphere to various cognitive and perceptual processes. One of their main findings was that the right hemisphere was capable of rudimentary language processing, but often has no lexical or grammatical abilities.
Pseudoscientific exaggeration of the research
Hines (1987) states that the research on brain lateralization is valid as a research program, though commercial promoters have applied it to promote subjects and products far out of the implications of the research. For example, the implications of the research have no bearing on psychological interventions such as EMDR, brain training equipment, or management training. One explanation for being so prone to exaggeration and false application is that the left-right brain dichotomy is an easy-to-understand notion, yet is often grossly oversimplified and misused for promotion in the guise of science. The research on lateralization of brain functioning is ongoing, and its implications are always tightly delineated, whereas the pseudoscientific applications are exaggerated, and applied to an extremely wide range of situations.
All the readers of this book will have been exposed to people selling training techniques etc. under the guise of it being based on claims that it is based on sound scientific research. In fact, it is my experience that few people know that it is based on small specific differences between the hemispheres of people that have suffered severe trauma to their brain (severing millions of nerves connecting the two hemispheres).
Hines is right when he says that the concept is ‘so easy to sell’ because it is an easy-to-understand notion. But, it is only an easy to understand notion if one views emotion to be different (and confounding) to rational thinking. The moment one changes this paradigm to one where emotional and rational needs to be integrated for decision making then it makes absolutely no sense for these to reside in different hemispheres.
THIS IS WHERE HEATH WILL GO FOR THE BOOK, GET FACTS AND QUOTES FROM ORIGINAL PAPERS!!
Herbert Kruggman was the … at … and was probably the first neuro-marketing experimenter of note. He used things like eye-tracking and EEG to research advertising.
During that time he published two papers in the Journal of Advertising Research that both had great influence in subsequent thinking:
o “Once is enough”
o “…”
In terms of the current story his second paper “ “ is much more relevant. Again because of its enduring influence on thinking not only in the last part of the previous century, but even today.
He argued, under the influence of Sperry and the pop-psychological view of the day about brain hemispheres, that:
· Print is a rational/logical medium, therefore addresses the left brain, which is the rational/logical hemisphere.
o Since recall measures relies on people recalling an advertisement based on verbal measures, it accesses the right brain, and therefore print should be tested using recall measures.
· Television is a visual/emotional medium, therefore addresses the right brain, which is the emotional hemisphere.
o Since recognition is a visual test of advertising memory, it is the correct test for television advertising rather than a recall measure.
The picture below shows the logic that Krugman applies.
This logic based on the paradigm of emotion versus rational still underlies many people’s arguments about how advertising should be researched, and mostly are unashamedly related back to Krugmans theories.
In 2008 the Wharton .. ran a conference to discuss the ‘Empirical Generalizations’ about advertising at which the major players in this area were invited to talk. Robert Heath’s paper was titled ‘Krugman Was Right’, indicating that the debate is still very active in the modern marketing arena. Readers can access this paper at …..
DO WE LEAVE THIS HEATH REFERENCE IN? I THINK HE HANGS HIMSELF??
CONSIDER DELETING. I MIGHT HAVE REFERED THIS EARLIER AS A OATLEY AND JENKINS QUOTE – IN WHICH CASE ONLY REFER TO HERE.
MAKES THE POINT ABOUT IMPORTANCE OF MOODS.
These two psychologist conducted a series of projects in which they inspected what happens to cognition when they induce a ‘mood’. My story is a lot about the effects of mood on consumer behaviour and it is worth while to read Oatley and Jenkins’ description of these ‘mood induced’ experiments by Isen and Bower.
I have quoted their work already in section xx.
??
Dave Berger and Richard Vaughn popularized this model for FCB advertising agency in the 1979 and it is one of the first advertising models that explicitly recognize emotions versus rational in the sense that the former has a role to play in decision making.
To put this into perspective: the Fishbein model is a emotions-versus-rational model in the sense that it views rational as the only part of decision making (much like the Economics model of a homo economicus). The FCB brain grid introduces the role of emotions, but still in a ‘versus’ rational role.
I took the following description from a website (http://drypen.in/advertising/fcb-grid-model-to-convey-communication-objectives.html):
The communication response would be different for high versus low involvement products and those which required mainly thinking (left brain) and feeling (right brain) information processing. To define involvement and think / feel, eight scales are used:
1. Very important decision
2.
3. Decision requires lot of thought
1. Unimportant decision.
2. Little to lose if you choose the wrong brand.
3. Decision requires little thought
Think or rational approach
1. Decision is / is not mainly logical or objective
2. Decision is / is not based mainly on functional facts
Feel or emotional approach
1. Decision is / is not based on a lot of feeling
2. Decision does / does not express one’s personality
3. Decision is / is not based on looks, tastes, touch, smell, or sound (sensory effects)
I do not know how much this model is still used in practice (especially since it is associated with one advertising agency), but it is probably the best known advertising model.
A contributing factor to its popularity would be that it was developed when the brain-hemispheric theories were popular and it is easy to replace the words ‘think versus feel with ‘left brain versus right brain’.
It is doing an injustice to the influence that Prof.
Jones has written 12 marketing books in his career, but none as important as When Advertising Works.
Incredible as it might sound, but until this book was written there was no consistent evidence that advertising works. There were a lot of case studies, and also a general belief. But no empirical generalized evidence.
With AC Nielsen Jones set up an experiment in which A.C. Nielsen collected data from 2000 households in the
1. The TV programs in the household using people-meters,
2. The brands they bought, using hand held bar-code scanners,
3. Over a period of …
4. For … brands.
GET FROM THE ORIGINAL
They then analyzed for each brands purchase occasion whether the buyer had an opportunity to see an advertisement for the brand on television in their household. The difference between the share of the brand in households that could have seen an advertisement in the past 7 days versus those that did not is called the …score. The difference was ascribed to the effect of the advertising.
He found that
This might not even have been relevant to my story of advertising emotions and brand feelings.
In fact, he spent a week holiday with Flemming Hansen and myself in
Of course this was his way of being contentious in the middle of a discussion, but it also reflects the arguments that psychologists had at the beginning of the 20th Century: Do we study phenomena, like Pavlov’s dog, and learn what works in terms of input-output, or do we try to speculate about the box in the middle. Certainly most of Cognitive Psychology (the study of how we learn) is input-output, and made big contributions to us bettering people.
When John was asked what were the things that distinguished advertisements that work better than others he said:
Which, while it was a comment in the inputs, also contained a speculation about the box, and pointed toward the interaction between emotion and rational.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Joseph E. LeDoux (b. 1949), a neuroscientist, is the Henry and Lucy Moses Professor of Science, and Professor of Neuroscience and Psychology at New York University. He is also the director of the Center for the Neuroscience of Fear and Anxiety, multi-university Center in NYC devoted to using animal research to understand pathological fear and anxiety in humans. He received his Ph.D. in 1977 at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.
LeDoux's research interests are mainly focused on the biological underpinnings of memory and emotion, especially the mechanisms of fear.
§ The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life, 1996, Simon & Schuster, 1998 Touchstone edition: ISBN 0-684-83659-9
§ Synaptic Self: How Our Brains Become Who We Are. 2002, Penguin Putnam, 2003 paperback: ISBN 0-14-200178-3
His area of interest is ‘fear and anxiety’ and he explains how the limbic system forms part of these emotional responses.
His book ‘The Emotional Brain’ postulates that there is a neuronal ‘shortcut’ in the brain which gets visual information to t
His real contribution to the history that we consider here is explaining in neurological terms the relationship between emotions and attention. He might not have been the first scientist to explain this, but he certainly popularized the insight.
1995 And then came Prof. Antonio Damasio
I started this book saying that the story of emotions in advertising is as much about understanding the brain to explain what happens with brands and advertising as it is one of applying our understanding of advertising to understand the brain.
He is a central character in my story, so I will not (again) explain here what he hypothesizes. I merely place him in this ‘history review’ so that you can understand that the advertising models before this date cannot be blamed for differentiating between emotions and rationality because they were compiled while Descartes paradigm was the reigning paradigm.
This communications model is often referenced in marketing literature. Because of its recency (and the fact that Larry Percy is a …) I have asked him to write a description for this book:
The Rossiter-Percy Grid (Rossiter and Percy, 1997) considers the two essential communication objectives for all marketing communication: brand awareness and brand attitude. While the model is generally discussed only in terms of its brand attitude component, it also posits brand awareness as a necessary objective for advertising prior to brand attitude.
The structure of the model is built upon the level of involvement in the purchase decision, and the underlying motivation driving the decision. It is informed by these criteria because each play a significant role in how the brain will process an advertising message; and importantly, will dictate different creative tactics to optimize that processing. In the model, involvement is defined in terms of risk (fiscal or psychological), either low or high. When risk is low, only attention and some low level learning, mediated by emotion, is required. Brand attitude will follow from trial. With high involvement decisions, where there is risk involved, the message must also be accepted. A positive brand attitude must be established prior to purchase.
Motivation must be considered because this is what energizes purchase action. Products are bought to satisfy either a negative motive such as problem-solution or problem avoidance, or a positive motive such as sensory gratification or social approval (among others). The motives underlying behavior in a category are operatively distinct and will have different implications for message strategy, and very specific emotions or emotional sequences will be associated with particular motivations. With negative motives, the negative emotion associated with an adverse event (e.g. a headache) will increase the motivational drive to ‘solve’ the problem. With resolution comes a positive emotional end-state. All of this must be accounted for in the message strategy to ensure effective message processing. In the model the brand attitude strategies dealing with negative motives are referred to as informational.
When the underlying motives is positive, the advertising strategy should focus upon appetitive or intrinsically rewarding events, linking it to the brand by stimulating an authentic emotional response. This positive emotional response becomes the brand benefit, building brand attitude. In the model, the brand attitude strategies dealing with positive motives are referred to as transformational.
Combining the involvement and motivation dimensions of attitude yield the four quadrants of the Rossiter-Percy Grid (see figure). Informational brand attitude strategies deal with negatively reinforcing motives, with different creative tactics necessary for the emotional portrayal of the motive and benefit-claim support for perceived brand delivery, depending upon the perceived risk for the product, target audience, and brand choice, functionally dichotomized into low versus high involvement. Transformational brand attitude strategies deal with positively reinforcing motives, also with correspondingly different creative tactics.
What the model underscores is that owing to the way in which the mind deals with information, the level of involvement in underlying motivation for a decision will necessarily dictate brand attitude strategy for advertising and when involvement is low, the target audience need not be ‘sold’, only interested; when high, they must be convinced by the message. When the underlying motive is negative, the key is in the information provided by the message; when positive, the ‘emotional authenticity’ of the execution is the key.
Many people know that I disagree with the conclusions that Robert Heath has come to, but this does not mean that he has not been a very important personality in the story of advertising emotions.
Robert published “…” in 200x, which in structure was very similar to my book The Advertised Mind. Both of us reviewed the role of emotions in advertising effectiveness starting with a section 1 being strongly based on the theories of Damasio. Both of us then had a section 2 where we explored the implications of this for advertising and research.
Our section 1’s could not have been more similar, other than our interpretation of whether Krugman was right. Our section 2 and conclusions could not have been more diametrically opposed if we had planned it.
In essence:
· Robert argued the power of emotions in advertising, and that advertising is a Low Involvement Process hence the power of emotions, and hence the inability of research techniques, like recall, to measure the advertising effects.
· I argued the opposite based on advertising being a low involvement process and the role of emotions being to increase attention, and therefore making it measurable, also via recall.
In the first edition of the model Robert used the terms ‘Low Involvement Processes’ and ‘High Involvement Processes’, but found people confuse his model with the FCB brain-grid terminologies and he the changed this to Low Attention Processes versus High Attention Processes.
I would argue that Roberts background of being inside agencies and arguing against copy-testers like Millward Brown has left him with an inner bias against Millward Brown arguments. Robert told me he believes I am biased in my views by Millward Brown philosophies. I pointed out that I wrote The Advertised Mind before my involvement with Millward Brown.
The argument continues, and this is good. We are learning about the brain, we don’t know much and need speculating and disagreement to keep us all sober about what we are learning.
2005 – Erik du Plessis ‘The Advertised Mind’
My book appeared in 2005 and would be considered, with Robert Heath’s, as one of the first books reporting on Damassio’s insights.
In this I describe the COMMAP model of advertising, which was first published in the Journal of Advertising Research in 1995, which was well before Prof. Damassio published. The research on which the model was based had nothing to do about views that differentiate between emotions and rationality. Yet the resultant model shows the interaction that exist between these two.
I will devote a chapter to this later.
AWAITING FLEMMING TO SEND A WRITE-UP OF HIS MODEL!
Professor Flemming Hansen of the
Consumer Behaviour is a subject in all courses of marketing, and is the intersection between marketing theory and other disciplines like psychology and economics. For obvious reasons this is the area where marketing is now intersecting with neurology and the neuro-sciences like neuro-economics, neuro-psychology etc.
Like I Flemming does not like the term neuro-marketing because it has already in its short life set up negative journalism as I indicated at the start of my book: “Buy-buttons”, etc. He came up with the term neuro-decision making which is much more to the point.
Currently he is heading the Decision Neuroscience Research Group at the
In 2007 he published Emotions, Advertising and Consumer Choice. This is not only the basic text for emotions in marketing measures, but is a report on a study on emotions and brands.
What Flemming did, with TNS in
Not only was the study done on a large sample, but it was verified by what happened during the year under consideration.
It is a truly magnificent piece of work.
In terms of the story that I am telling about brand feelings one should not begin to under-estimate what Flemming managed to achieve.
The subject of neuro-marketing is now popular and many conferences are run on this, and there are people showing brain-scans of subjects considering brands. All of these are only verified by asking people questions about the brands and then showing that the brain-scan pictures verify the answers to the questions people were asked.
Graham Page’s award winning paper at the xxx ESOMAR conference is exactly arguing this point:
“We are verifying the observations from brain scans and other technology by asking people questions. We can only interpret the pictures of the brain, at this stage based on what people tell us. At this stage brain pictures does not tell us anything other than what we firstly find out by asking questions. The pictures verify what we suppose about the brain.”
The objective of our understanding brain research is not to find a way that we will push a thousand respondents into a fMRI machine to find out whether our advertisement of new brand will work.
The objective is to understand how feelings work, and then to ask better research questions (and interpret them better), and how this can improve marketing.
This is what Flemming proved can be done in his experiment with TNS.
Starting from zero-base and only using feeling dimensions he measured the brands, predicted their market share and then their market share changes in the next year relative to their marketing activities. “A small step for man, a big step for marketing”.
2008 - Martin Lindstrom and ‘Buy-ology – how everything we knew about why we buy is wrong’
In my opinion, in many ways, what Martin Lindstrom did with his book buy-ology is wrong. But it is destined to be a part of neuro-marketing’s history.
It is based on a an amazing study involving 2000 volunteers using the latest in brain-scanning technology that cost $7million (I.e. an amazing $3 5000 per respondent) and was done in several countries. Of these 200 were scanned using fMRI.
In essence they considered the brain-scans and jumped to conclusions, rather than consider what is known about why we buy brands and what is known about the brain to interpret their brain measurements.