Sentient Insight: the business blog for consumer psychology and consumer marketing

In act II of Romeo and Juliet, Juliet first learns that Romeo (her new love) is a Montague, a longstanding familial rival. Overwhelmed by the dismay of her predicament, she famously longs for her lover in harmonious soliloquy: “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose / By any other name would smell as sweet,” as if saying, ‘I don’t care what his name is, names are arbitrary; like a rose, I love him for who he is, not his name.’

My mother has always told me that age is a state of mind, and if you wanted to be younger, you can simply “think younger”. Though I’m sure many aging folk would disagree with such maternal wisdom, behavioral researchers John A. Bargh, Mark Chen, and Laura Burrows have evidence that supports my Mom’s thesis! In their 1996 experiment, Automaticity of Social Behavior: Direct Effects of Trait Construct and Stereotype Activation on Action, these three NYU researches tested whether or not subconscious priming can directly affect behavior.

“In defense of marketing” is an on-going theme here at Sentient. As marketers, we are often put in a position to defend what we do as an ethical and valuable service. When faced with that challenge, our argument runs deeper than the standard “consumers need marketing in order to make informed choices” and puts forth a much stronger statement: Marketing has been ingrained in our species since the advent of sexual selection, we have needed effective subconscious marketing to ensure the survival of our genes, these same marketing tactics are at play in our current consumer culture, and it is therefore the responsibility of market researchers to understand the subconscious influences on behavior in order to provide products and services that are truly valued by consumers.

As a culture (or perhaps just a cold New England culture) we’ve developed stereotypes about some of the warmer states like sunny California (72 and sunny!) or the renowned hospitality of the genteel Southern states. There might be a scientific explanation for this kind of thinking. Research on interpersonal impression shows that warmth in particular can exert considerable power on how we judge people. When given a hot cup of coffee to hold by a stranger in an elevator for just a few moments, people rated this stranger’s personality more warmly. The opposite was true, too: if given a cup of ice coffee in identical circumstances, participants in the experiment rated the personality of the stranger as being colder.

I’m sure we’ve all noticed that “the weather” is the classic go-to conversation starter if you’re in need of small-talk, especially if you’re with a stranger and have nothing to say. It’s always a wonderful candidate for speaking-about-nothing because it’s ubiquitous (there’s weather everywhere), it affects everyone, and it’s a fairly objective, neutral topic. For those same reasons, it’s also an interesting topic for behavioral science.

We’re gearing up for the annual MRA conference being held in Boston this week! Aaron will be presenting a session, In Defense of Marketing: The Peacock’s Plume and Dancing Birds of Paradise Thursday at 11:00AM, and I’ll be working various stations, from hospitality booth to door monitoring some events. In addition, we’re sponsoring a wine and cheese reception Thursday from 4-6PM – planned so you don’t have to choose between the many after-hours events on Thursday including a Boston meet-up and the chapter event being held at the Aquarium.

Surely who we choose for a sexual partner is based on our conscious preferences, right? Perhaps not as much as you think. Apparently, the power of the subconscious is so substantial that male preference for romantic partners is dependent on how much change ($) we have in our pockets at the time of evaluating a mate for selection. In a brilliant experimental manipulation, Nelson and Morrison (2005) found that male preference for ideal weight of a romantic partner actually depends on whether we have money on our person when we are asked the question.