Category Archives: Advertising
Choice Paralysis
I tend to not read much fiction. Girls hate when I tell them this because it makes me sound boring and unromantic. I can almost always see their eyes roll when I say I prefer reading non-fiction. For me, if I am looking for entertainment or pleasure, I tend to want something that lets me kind of zone out and turn off. Reading is too active for me. I can’t just glaze over and read a pleasure book. That is not to say I don’t get pleasure from reading, but it is a pleasure of learning something new.
I am particularly interested in Behavioral Economics. Why we make certain decisions. One of the notions that always sticks with me is “Choice Paralysis“. When asked, a person will always state that they prefer more choices. “I want the product that suits me perfectly” they think. However, in practice, this is often not the case. When presented with too many choices, we get overwhelmed with a fear that we will pick the wrong product – my choice wasn’t as good in the end as another, or with this much customization this product should have been perfect – and in many cases choose to just avoid the decision entirely.
An interview with a Columbia Business School professor sums it up well:
So when I was a PhD student at Stanford University I used to frequent this grocery store called Draeger’s and you know it was… you had a little bit of that same feeling because this was a store that offered you so many varieties, things you’d never contemplated before, you know like 250 mustards and vinegars and over 500 different kinds of fruits and vegetables, or over 2 dozen different types of water and this is at a time when you know most of us drank tap water, so I used to go to this store and examine all the varieties and we used to marvel at all the choices out there, but I found that I rarely bought anything and I kind of thought that was kind of curious. I mean, they had things that the other grocery stores didn’t have and yet I never bought anything.
And so one day I went to the manager and I asked him whether his model was working and he said, “Well, haven’t you seen how many customers we have in this store?” And yes indeed I had. I mean it was definitely attracting a lot of customers, even attracting tourist buses that would land up at this store and people would go through the store and marvel at all the options, even sometimes take photographs of the various aisles.
So the manager agreed to let me do a little experiment where we put out a little tasting booth next to the entry. We either put out 6 different flavors of jam or 24 different flavors of jam and we looked at 2 things. First, in what case were people more likely to buy a jar of jam? The first thing we looked at, in what case were people more likely to be attracted to the jar or jam, so in which case are people more likely to stop when they saw the display of jams and what we found was that more people stopped when there were 24 jams. About 60% of the people stopped when we had 24 jams on display and then at the times when we had 6 different flavors of jam out on display only 40% of the people actually stopped, so more people were clearly attracted to the larger varieties of options, but then when it came down to buying, so the second thing we looked at is in what case were people more likely to buy a jar of jam. What we found was that of the people who stopped when there were 24 different flavors of jam out on display only 3% of them actually bought a jar of jam whereas of the people who stopped when there were 6 different flavors of jam 30% of them actually bought a jar of jam. So, if you do the math, people were actually 6 times more likely to buy a jar of jam if they had encountered 6 than if they encountered 24, so what we learned from this study was that while people were more attracted to having more options, that’s what sort of got them in the door or got them to think about jam, when it came to choosing time they were actually less likely to make a choice if they had more to choose from than if they had fewer to choose from.
And a large part of that has to do with the fact that when people have a lot of options to choose from they don’t know how to tell them apart. They don’t know how to keep track of them. They start asking themselves “Well which one is the best? Which one would be good for me?” And all those questions are much easier to ask if you’re choosing from six than when you’re choosing from 24 and if you look at the marketplace today most often we have a lot more than 24 of things to choose from.
A great TED talk on this same topic here. He discusses how this choice paralysis is making society as a whole unhappy.:
Think about your own life. Are there things were you are avoiding making a decision on? Is it because you have too many choices? What can you do to par these down and stop the paralysis?
New Era – Yankees v Red Sox
Love this new line of ads from New Era. They star two of my favorite comedy actors from NBC, John Krasinski and Alec Baldwin. Great chemistry here.
Virtual Test Drive
I really like Dodge’s commercials lately. Will it make me consider Dodge? No, but I smile at them.
Here is a good one:
Sabotage Branding
A week ago I wrote a post about how branding allows us to signal things about ourselves- specifically our status. As time goes on, we are becoming more sophisticated with our signalling and are figuring out to separate ourselves from groups we don’t want to belong to by avoiding those signals.
In lay terms, this explains why certain brands fall out of favor. Perhaps a certain clothing label is really trendy and upscale. Then some lower social classes get a hold of it and it becomes too popular. The original message the brand sent out is diminished, watered down or even disappears and transforms into something else.
A friend sent me a funny article about how certain brands are trying to avoid that fate. The Jersey Shore is a popular TV show – but not everyone who watches wants to emulate the tanned, muscular hair-gelled stars. Many are watching to laugh at the cast members.
Therefore, when the stars of that show get attached to a certain brand, that brand may not like being associated with that star – and all the airtime and photos their product gets placed in. Sure, the star may be trying to signal she is high class by wearing a certain brand of clothing, but to that clothing line, they see their brand being degraded.
Allegedly, the anxious folks at these various luxury houses are all aggressively gifting our gal Snookums with free bags. No surprise, right? But here’s the shocker: They are not sending her their own bags. They are sending her each other’s bags! Competitors‘ bags!
This is fantastic. Encourage the star to use another brand of bag, and the benefits are twofold. Yours is out of the spotlight, and theirs is now being dragged through the mud.
De-Branding Ourselves
A few months after I started attending a prestigious private liberal arts university known for its wealthy student body – I had a discussion with someone from home. They put forward a though about how the student parking lot must be full of lexus, BMW, and Mercedes badges. While there were certainly a fair share of those – there were also a surprising number of Fords, Chevrolets, and Jeeps. And there certainly weren’t any expensive “rims” or custom body work.
For the students I went to school with, this didn’t raise an eyebrow. It is just the way things are. There isn’t a lot of status or value in showing off wealth. Too ostentatious to show off that you have money.
If you truly are wealthy – generations of family money – then people just know you are wealthy. Only those who recently have come into money feel the need to show it off. They have to prove they belong in this class – by buying fancy labels and brands that loudly show off their expense.
Recently I found a NY Time article discussing a new study showing that the very rich and very poor both like brands that don’t use a lot of logos. My thoughts on the reasons:
Anything we buy with prominent branding serves to signal to others. What it signals depends on the brand. A luxury car might signal you have money to spend on a nicer car with greater performance or safety features, while driving a Toyota might show you prefer reliability.
For the lower class purchasers – any brand they could purchase would probably only serve to signal that they were low class. Imagine if Wal-Mart put out a line of “wal mart” clothing. Those people who were striving to get out of the lower class and into the middle or upper classes wouldn’t want to brand themselves as low class by putting wal-mart all over their bodies. So, instead they purchase clothing with few brands on it. Hard to label someone without clear identifying signals.
For the extreme upper class, the motives are slightly different. The study thesis states:
people with more cultural capital in a particular domain prefer subtle signals because they provide differentiation from the mainstream. Such insiders have the necessary connoisseurship to decode the meaning of subtle signals that facilitate communication with others “in the know.”
The Spirit of Spirits
There has been some discussion about how beer sales have gone down recently, presumably because of the economy’s effect on everyone’s wallets.
What I find more interesting is that people’s tastes in hard liquor seem to change with the economy as well. This is largely in part because people seem to understand different types of liquors have different personalities. A neat article from Slate discusses this phenomenon and its impact on how marketing changes to reflect this. As the writer explains:
Crown Royal is a blended whiskey, and there’s long been a sort of philosophical divide between the “brown spirits” (whiskey, bourbon, cognac) and the “white spirits” (vodka, gin, rum). Brown spirits are warmer on the throat and heavier on the stomach. White spirits are better suited for mixing into light, refreshing—sometimes froofy—cocktails. Because the two categories tend to attract very different drinkers, they tend to use very different marketing imagery.
They examine a high end vodka ad, which portrays class and the good life. “It features glimmering black-and-white cinematography and takes place aboard a two-masted yacht full of beautiful women slurping mollusks. There is no dialogue, but the visuals strive to convey a sense of luxury, possibility, and, above all, sex.”
Contrast that to the ad for brown spirits: “Ads for brown spirits, by contrast, are far more apt to emphasize a storied heritage or exacting quality standards. Perhaps it’s because fewer women drink brown spirits, and men are more susceptible to a stuffy pitch about a drink’s distillation process. Perhaps it’s because brown spirits seem to elicit a weightier, more somber flavor of drunkenness. But whatever the reason, I feel we’ve come to associate white spirits with DJ’d club parties and expensive nights on the town, while brown spirits are for barstool conversations and quiet nightcaps.”
One brand is celebrating ostentatious wealth, while the other is paying tribute to brotherhood and remembering where you came from. If Grey Goose’s promise is that you’ll get laid on a yacht, Crown Royal’s promise is that your life will brim with purpose and community.
Do you understand different types of booze to have different “moods”? Certainly, I can understand drinks having a certain something. There are reasons why Cosmos are ordered on girls night out and whiskey on the rocks is what you order after a rough day at work. What drink is “your” drink? Do you think it reflects your personality? Or, what you believe your personality to be?
Corona Commercials
I am not one for beer humor normally. However the latest series of Corona ads actually make me chuckle. I like that there are continuing “characters” and a “story arc”, er, of sorts. Check them out – in order of their air dates.
Misleading Comparative Advertising? There’s a map for that.
If you’ve been watching TV during the past few weeks you’ve probably seen that biting parody ad that Verizon put out attacking AT&T’s network.
It is a pretty direct attack on what Verizon must feel is their biggest threat. The tag line is “There’s a map for that.” A clear parody of Apple/AT&T’s “There’s an app for that” campaign for the iPhone. The “other” guy in the ad is also clearly using an iPhone if you look carefully.
The ad points out that Verizon’s 3G data map is 5 times larger than AT&T’s. The map they use to show that is especially illustrative of this.
AT&T has filed a lawsuit claiming that the map is misleading. While Verizon clearly states “3G” and says the same, the way the ad plays out is that that blue AT&T map shows coverage. What they don’t point out is that even if you don’t get 3G coverage in that blue map, you still fallback to the 2nd Generation EDGE data network. You have data coverage, its just slower.
Do you think it is a confusing ad? Did you understand that? If not, you are the reason AT&T is suing.
Surf The Internet Quieter and Faster
How many times have you been crusing around the internet and get a blaring, loud, flashy ad annoying you while you are just trying to read a news article?
I used to have this problem all the time – until I discovered Ad Block Plus. ABP is a Firefox add-on which runs in your browser. When you visit pages it automatically removes the ads. I can’t overstate how peaceful this has made my browsing experience. The best part is if you feel like you want to see an ad, or if you suspect it accidentally blocked a legit part of a website, one click turns it off.
Check out this video, and then go download it.
