High-Effort Consumer Behavior Archives

A Strange, Brief History of Subliminal Messages in Advertising

It all began in a Fort Lee, NJ movie theater in 1957. Psychologist James Vicary projected images on the screen at 1/3,000 of a second urging viewers to “drink Coca-Cola” and “eat popcorn”. Vicary conducted this study over a six-week period and claimed to have increased popcorn sales by 50 percent and Coca-Cola sales by 18 percent compared to the previous period.[1] Here’s the problem, it was all made up.[2] Yep, when other researchers couldn’t replicate these results, he admitted it was completely fabricated. Since this fabricated study, there have been numerous others that have been conducted. I would guess that everyone reading this believes that subliminal advertising is a thing that has, or at least could work. Why? Well, because it’s used EVERYWHERE. So could it work? Keep reading, I get to that at the end.

The pervasiveness of this idea has infiltrated so many brands and even many areas of pop culture. Why would so many brands try subliminal images and messages if they didn’t work? The Simpsons use it, KFC and Coca-Cola have done it, there are even many famous logos that are intended to have hidden images. And of course, who can forget Kevin Nealon’s character, Mr. Subliminal from SNL’s Weekend Update in the 90’s, who always gave a hilarious parody to the notion that our minds could be controlled by subliminal means?

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However, if we notice something, is it subliminal? I’m guessing the answer to that would be no. Although it’s not illegal, the FCC will revoke the licenses of any company that uses subliminal or deceptive marketing. However, if it’s truly subliminal, how would they ever know? Where is the subliminal threshold in our minds? How much is subliminal advertising being used and is it secretly controlling our minds, turning us into brainless zombie-like consumers? I’m guessing if you’ve ever seen the aftermath of a big music festival, or been to Wal Mart on a Saturday, you might say yes, but don’t fall into the anecdotal evidence trap just yet.

Subliminal Advertising is a Sticky Idea

Dan and Chip Heath’s groundbreaking book, Made to Stick, outlines why so many people believe that subliminal advertising might secretly be controlling everyone’s minds even though that is (probably) not the case. The creepy mind-control idea is one that is sticky, and a sticky idea is one that will perpetuate throughout the cultural zeitgeist. As humans, we really just want a good story and it doesn’t really matter if it is true. Also, there was the whole CIA mind control experiments, MK Ultra, that were actually a thing, regardless if the hat you wear is made out of tin foil or not.

Once you hear about the idea of subliminal advertising and your brain ties it to being controlled into doing something, it’s hard to shake. To add to this problem, consumers experience what’s known as source confusion. Source confusion is basically when you hear one of these sticky stories, forget about it, and when it comes up later, you can remember the story, but not where you heard about it or if it is actually true. Do you remember hearing that KFC officially changed their name to just KFC from Kentucky Fried Chicken because their “chicken” doesn’t actually contain chicken? Or that McDonald’s uses pig fat in their ice cream? Well, these stories are not true, but they remain true in people’s minds regardless of the actual truth. These and many other myths about companies stay in our minds because they are sticky.

These stories are strange enough to be remembered and they’re on the fringe of being believable. They’re the type of story that you could tell a friend and their response would simply be “Yep, I could see that” and the myth spreads. So, the stickiness of the story that subliminal advertising controlling our minds continues to permeate throughout our society, all just because it is a weird and interesting story. But not so fast, there may actually be some evidence that it can impact our behaviors (more on that later).

The 1950s

After Vicary’s bogus “experiment”, he went on to write one of the most influential books on the subject of subliminal advertising, The Hidden Persuaders. This book sold over a million copies and became one of the major influences that shaped our views of the possibilities of subliminal advertising. Should a guy that lied about his experiment be taken seriously? Again, back to the stickiness idea, did it matter? Not really, it was a good story, so it went straight to the top of the bestsellers list and people like me are writing about it 60+ years later.

1960s & 1970s

Well, dust off your tin foil hats again because this is a weird one. Forever ago, TV used to not broadcast 24/7. In the ’60s, before the networks would go off the air, they would play the Star-Spangled Banner, complete with subtitles. However, if you slow those subtitles WAYYYYY Down, you can see subliminal words briefly flash across the screen. You can even try it yourself, slow this down to the slowest setting on YouTube, which is 0.25.

There are several series of subliminal words that you can find like: trust the US government, God is real God is watching, and rebellion is not tolerated. That was creepy. Moving on…

In the ’70s, Premium Corporation of America marketed a memory matching board game called Husker Du (not the punk band from St. Paul). In the process, they created a TV ad that showed the gameplay, but they also flashed several frames with the words “get it”.[3] This ultimately led to declaring that subliminal ads were contrary to the public interest.

The 2000s

Who would have ever thought that tobacco companies would try to break the rules? Well, in the early 2000s, Marlboro was a major advertiser in Formula One racing sponsoring the Ferrari team. In 2005, in order to try and subvert an EU ban on advertising cigarettes, they decided to replace their logo with a really strange barcode. Well, if the barcode is blurry, it sort of looks like the Marlboro logo (sort of). Nice try Marlboro. Years later, they tried this other approach by creating a “company” called Mission Winnow (win now:). So, it’s a new strange company and if you are curious enough to look it up online, you’re going to land on a website owned by Phillip Morris. Is that subliminal advertising? Again, people noticed it. It’s not completely hidden, so probably not. Is it subversive and right up a tobacco company’s modus operandi? Absolutely.

In 2007, in an episode of Food Network’s Iron Chef America, a McDonald’s episode flashed across the screen. Both McDonald’s and the Food Network claim that it was a glitch. Check it out for yourself:

In 2008, KFC was pushing a chicken sandwich called the KFC Snacker. In one of the closing shots, you can see a dollar bill hidden among the lettuce. They claimed that they were running a contest for the first people that spotted the dollar, but the contest was never announced until they started hearing about people accusing them of subliminal advertising. Again, is it subliminal if you can see it? Check it out here:

Also of note, check out @kfc on Twitter. They follow 11 people: Herb Scribner, Geri Horner (Halliwell), Melanie Brown, Emma Bunton, Mel C, Victoria Beckham, Herb J. Wesson, Jr., Herb Waters, Herb Dean, Herb Sandek, and Herb Alpert. If you don’t get the joke, you might claim that they’ve engaged in some form of subliminal advertising, but I presume you weren’t born yesterday.

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Hidden Messages in Logos

I’m guessing that you probably know about most of these, but I think that if nothing else, the artistry for pulling off the hidden elements in a logo needs deserves a special mention in a blog post about subliminal messages in advertising. Designing a really cool logo is tough enough, but it’s even harder to design something that looks great and has a hidden message. Let’s get to it.

FedEx

Created in 1994 by Landor Associates, the FedEx logo is one of the most brilliant logo designs ever created. Although it’s possibly one of the most boring looking logos (on the surface), it has a hidden message. What hidden message? Well, the arrow between the E and the X. Once you see the arrow, you can never unsee the arrow.

Baskin Robbins

I actually did a case study on this in one of my MBA marketing research classes, but in 2007, Baskin Robbins was feeling the heat from people like Cold Stone Creamery. In addition to a logo redesign, they were considering complete store redesigns. Their new logo design featured the 31 making up the B and the R of the logo, which is a nod to their original claim to fame of having 31 flavors. Something you might not know, they actually have something like 1,300 flavors now, the 31 flavors was originally created in the ’50s and was built on the idea that someone could have a different flavor for each day of the month.

Toblerone

Toblerone originated in Bern, Switzerland, which is a city that is famous for bears. They were able to integrate a hidden bear in the mountain in the logo.

Toyota

The Toyota logo is in a category all its own. There’s not really a hidden graphic or anything, it’s just that you can spell the name of the company with the shapes in the logo. Go ahead, try it.

There are other really cool hidden items in logos, I just didn’t include them because I couldn’t find any good legal photos that I could use to illustrate. If you’d like to see more, check out the following:

The word MOM in the collar of the Wendy’s logo
Two people sharing a bowl of salsa in the Tostito’s logo
Bike rider (possibly on steroids) in the Tour de France logo
Hidden Hershey’s Kiss hidden in their logo
Pin in the Pinterest logo
The bird in the Atlanta Falcons logo makes an “F”
The M and the B in the Milwaukee Brewers logo

Backmasking

Depending on how deliberate it is, backmasking is either a technique or in most cases, it’s just pareidolia, like seeing a face in a tree or the virgin Mary on a piece of toast. Backmasking is essentially where you play a record backward and it reveals a hidden message, or someone finds something that sounds pretty vague, they say that it says something, and then a bunch of people start believing they heard the same thing. I use the term record, and not song, because this phenomenon really took off in the ’60s and 70s when you could literally take the turntable and spin the record backward. I actually did this a bunch with my Led Zeppelin records as a kid when I heard about this. Sometimes it’s deliberate, sometimes it’s borderline, and sometimes it’s probably just a coincidence.

Here are some examples:

The Beatles

In 1966, The Beatles kicked off this technique on the song “Rain”. When played in reverse, you can hear, “Sunshine … Rain … When the rain comes, they run and hide their heads”. The White Album sparked the Paul is Dead conspiracy (that he died in a car crash and was replaced with a lookalike and that’s the reason they stopped touring). For instance, when you play Revolution #9 backwards, you hear “turn me on dead man”, and when you play “I’m So Tired” backward, you hear “Paul is a dead man, miss him, miss him, miss him”. Actually, this kind of makes Revolution #9 actually makes sense…

Led Zeppelin

Stairway to Heaven is one of those songs that was intertwined in the now-debunked Satanic Panic era of human history. The famous line is “here’s to my sweet Satan”, although I tend to hear, “Yish de maze we zaydin”. Now I loved Led Zeppelin as a kid, but if you really want to have a conversation about subliminal messages and Led Zeppelin, let’s discuss their huge catalog of “borrowed” work and how Stairway to Heaven sounds eerily similar to the song Taurus by Sprit.

ELO

After being pulled into the controversary and being accused of satanic messages in their music, ELO explicitly placed some backmasked tracks on the instrumental, “Fire on High” that says (in crystal clarity when played backward, “The music is reversible, but time is not. Turn back! Turn back! Turn back! Turn back!” They even doubled down on this further, when they released an entire album called Secret Messages.

Others

There are so many others to choose from, it’s hard to pick but here are the artists, the song, and the backmasked message that can be heard:

Pink Floyd – Empty Spaces – “Congratulations. You have just discovered the secret message. Please send your answer to Old Pink, care of the Funny Farm, Chalfont”
The Waitresses – The Smartest Person I Know – “Anyone who believes in backwards masking is a fool.”
B-52’s – Detour Through Your Mind – “I buried my parakeet in the backyard. Oh no, you’re playing the record backwards. Watch out, you might ruin your needle.”
Devo – Whip It – “Hey come over here!”
Weird Al – I Remember Larry – “Wow, you must have an awful lot of free time on your hands”
The Simpsons – Drop da Bomb – “Join the Navy” (This was from the episode where Bart joined a boy band and had a hit song with the repeated lyric “Yvan eht nioj”.)

So, does backmasking even qualify as subliminal messaging? Does it fit the theme of the article of “subliminal messages in advertising”? I would argue that it could qualify for both. For the messages that are gibberish when played forwards and clear when played backward, these are deliberately placed by artists, often just to have fun. These are definitely not subliminal. This is just taking the track and reversing it. However, when there is clearly no gibberish played forwards, there’s a chance it’s subliminal, although it’s likely just pareidolia. However…listen to Queen’s “Another One Bites the Dust” backward and I would have to say, that might actually be a subliminal message.

Is it advertising? Well, sort of. For many of the bands that either did this deliberately or just got accused of adding messages to their songs, it’s generated a ton of PR. Any press is good press, right? The best part is that they didn’t have to spend anything extra to generate the buzz. Have I ever mentioned how musicians are inherently the best marketers? PS, read between the lines of this article and let me know if you can find the hidden message.

Why Do I Think Subliminal Advertising Could Work?

The Elaboration Likelihood Model

Thirty years after The Hidden Persuaders was written, a couple of researchers, John Cacioppo from the University of Iowa, and Richard Petty (not the drives real fast guy) from the University of Missouri-Columbia published a paper that would completely change the way that we study consumer behavior. The Elaboration Likelihood Model describes two distinct methods of persuasion: central-route processing and peripheral-route processing. Central-route processing occurs when the receiver of the message has both the ability and motivation to think about a message. Central-route processing occurs when the recipient is thinking about the content of the message and carefully considering the pros and cons of selecting a particular product.[4] Think of evaluating a new car, or a home. This type of reasoning involves central-route processing.

Peripheral-route processing, however, is when the consumer doesn’t think very much about their purchase. During this type of processing, a purchase is made for reasons other than the strength of the arguments. Think of grabbing a snack or choosing a toothpaste. Unless you’re a crazy person, you don’t spend much time evaluating all of your alternatives on low-effort items that you pick up at the grocery store. With peripheral-route processing, a consumer is more driven by unconscious influences and the environment and simple beliefs about a product or a brand. During low-effort consumer behavior and peripheral-route processing, feelings, and emotions toward a product can be swayed by a consumer’s mood, attitude toward an ad, or just being familiar with the brand.[5] Yep, it can be that easy. If you like a product or an ad or are even just exposed to an ad enough times, you could be influenced to purchase the product.

So What Does This All Mean?

So this is where it gets interesting. In one respect, we know that we prefer familiar products over unfamiliar ones, and this can be done by repeated advertising or messaging.[6] On the other hand, we have numerous studies that are unable to recreate the success from the Vicary “study”. So, I guess this raises several questions, what counts as subliminal? Does it need to be noticeable to the consumer? Is 1/3,000 even noticeable? How many frames of video would you need for this to have an impact? What frequency would you need to combine with a noticeable amount of subliminal advertising to make a statistically significant impact on someone’s purchasing behavior?

Since you can’t prove a negative, it is impossible to say that subliminal advertising or subliminal messages have no impact. What could be said is that there are no credible studies that show that any type of subliminal advertising had the intended effect on the advertiser. To prove that subliminal advertising or messaging worked, you’d have to create a really clever lab or field study. Well, it turns out that a few studies have actually shown that subliminal influence had long-term effects on decision making[7], can change our mood[8], and showing logos subliminally can actually alter our brand behavior[9]. There are more but come on, I’m not doing a doctoral dissertation literature review here…

So it has been shown to change people’s behaviors and if you dive into a research library’s database, you can find a bunch of credible studies. This leads me back to one of the original questions if it’s truly subliminal, how would anyone ever know? How would the FCC catch an advertiser that is using subliminal advertising? I’m personally not willing to believe that many advertisers are actually doing this. I’ve worked in marketing for 15+ years and I’m about to get a marketing certificate in an MBA program and I can tell you that the topic of subliminal advertising gets very little attention. I don’t think it’s happening that much, but it’s certainly happening and has happened for decades. Does it have much of an impact on our behavior? That’s something that I can’t really definitively answer.

[1] Fullerton, R. A. (2010). “A virtual social H-bomb”: The late 1950s controversy over subliminal advertising. Journal of Historical Research in Marketing, 2(2), 166-173. doi:http://dx.doi.org.prox.lib.ncsu.edu/10.1108/17557501011042533

[2] Broyles, Sheri J. 2006. Subliminal Advertising and the Perpetual Popularity of Playing to People’s Paranoia. The Journal of Consumer Affairs.

[3] https://www.nytimes.com/1973/12/27/archives/subliminal-ad-pops-up-in-national-tv-promotion-but-mr-choate-stated.html

[4] Cacioppo, J. T., & Petty, R. E. (1984). The elaboration likelihood model of persuasion. Advances in Consumer Research, 11, 673.

[5] Consumer Behavior P 129

[6] Baker, William E. “When Can Affective Conditioning and Mere Exposure Directly Influence Brand Choice?” Journal of Advertising 28 no. 4, Winter 1999. pp. 31-46

[7] Ruch, S., Züst, M. A., & Henke, K. (2016). Subliminal messages exert long-term effects on decision-making. Neuroscience of consciousness, 2016(1), niw013. https://doi.org/10.1093/nc/niw013

[8] Monahan JL, Murphy ST, Zajonc RB. Subliminal Mere Exposure: Specific, General, and Diffuse Effects. Psychological Science. 2000;11(6):462-466. doi:10.1111/1467-9280.00289

[9] Muscarella, C., Brintazzoli, G., Gordts, S., Soetens, E., & Van den Bussche, E. (2013). Short- and long-term effects of conscious, minimally conscious and unconscious brand logos. PLoS One, 8(5) doi:http://dx.doi.org.prox.lib.ncsu.edu/10.1371/journal.pone.0057738

Your Brand is Not Your Logo

Your brand is not your logo. It’s not your color palette and it’s not your fonts. Those are visual identities. They are part of your brand. These visual identities help communicate your brand and help distinguish your brand among all of the other logos and visual identities, but they’re not your brand. Obviously, you need to do the basic blocking and tackling of making sure your visual identity and name are consistent throughout your business and that people know who you are and what you do. However, there’s much more to it.

Your brand is your promise to your customers and your employees, and although your visual identity contributes to the recognition of that promise, it goes much deeper than that. I’m guessing that you already know this, but this post is dedicated to the things that make up your brand, the people.

You’re Not Completely in Control

Yep, unfortunately, this is a sad reality. When you are in business, you’re not totally in control of your brand. You can take steps to manage the direction and perception of your brand, but you are not completely in control because your brand is only as strong as how your customers and potential customers perceive your brand. You can obviously cover some of the basics, like making sure your products don’t break and your service doesn’t suck, but depending on the size of your company and the steps you need to take to evolve a negative brand perception, this could be easier said than done. So, what can you do? Although you probably dread the subject, the next part of this post is partially about the good old mission, vision, and values. Okay, I know I probably made you groan and maybe I totally lost you, but don’t stop now, you already sunk a few minutes to get to this point. I hope to bring a real-world approach on how to integrate these items to help drive your brand and not just be something that gets created behind closed doors and hangs on the wall somewhere in the office.

Your Internal Customers

Your brand begins and ends with your employees (more on this later). They are the number one asset to your organization. A great organization has Rockstar employees that feel empowered. They feel proud to be part of a company that is treating them right and letting them make decisions. When reviewing your brand, make sure that your employees understand your company mission, vision, and values. Also, it is critical that your employees share your corporate values. If not, your employees are not aligned with your company’s foundation.

Developing Your Values

Whether you are a startup or a well-established company, developing or refreshing your company values is essential to maintaining your current employees and making the right hires. Values are an excellent way to communicate the fundamental ideas to empower your employees to make decisions. Without an empowered workforce, there are always people that serve as bottlenecks to making decisions. This typically leads to overall employee frustration, lost opportunity cost, and a decrease in productivity. Instead, an empowered workforce that is encouraged to make decisions based on your corporate values can exponentially increase your productivity and innovation.

For instance, if your values include a relentless pursuit of the best customer service, given the right structure and autonomy, an empowered employee can take several steps to handle customer issues when they arise before taking the issue to the manager. A value like this can also help define the direction of your company by placing a higher emphasis on employee training for items like how to deal with difficult customers, how to manage tough situations, and how to create customer-centric solutions.

What’s Your Vision?

Do you really know where you want your company to go? Who you want to be? What you strive to achieve in the future? If not, your brand value can and will continue to erode. In business, you evolve or die, and having a well-defined vision is critical to driving your company forward. Do you strive to be innovative? Want to diversify? Deep down, do you really want to completely change the way that your company operates? Having a vision for your brand is kind of like setting a stretch goal for your business. The same thought process that applies to personal goal setting applies to your business. However, think of this as a stretch goal.

While a normal goal will be slightly unattainable and may only require you to stretch yourself only a little, a stretch goal makes you push for amazing things. Oftentimes, stretch goals will require you to completely reimagine what you are doing. If running a 5K is a goal, running a marathon is a stretch goal. If taking an online course is a goal, getting an MBA is a stretch goal. So how could you apply it to your business?

Let’s say for instance your goal is to launch a new product in the next year. Your stretch goal could be to become the leading product in the category. These are two completely different goals. One requires you to check all of your normal boxes for a product launch. The other requires you to completely take over the category. You’ve got to lead in features, pricing, packaging, promotion, industry relationships, advertising, well…everything. A stretch goal can make you a little crazy, but it typically takes this type of thinking to do anything amazing.

From an overall business standpoint, where does this put your vision? Well, does it make you a little uncomfortable? Is it something that everyone can believe in? Is it measurable? If so, you’re on the path to setting a stretch goal.

Mission Statement

Aah yes, the dreaded mission statement. You’ve probably agonized over this in school. Maybe you’ve messed with it in a meeting. Maybe you’ve never been part of this conversation and you’ve just been told what it is or sat in a meeting where it was explained. Maybe you don’t know it at all. Regardless, your mission should actually mean something and not be something that you dread. Think of your own personal mission in life. What do you want to do in this life? Is it to leave the world a better place? Is it to teach your children your values? Is it to be a Rockstar? Maybe to be a doctor? Regardless, you should have something inside of you that drives you to achieve these goals; something that pushes you to be better every day. This is what your mission statement should convey.

Customer Service

For nearly a decade, I’ve been an advocate for the idea that your customer service personnel should be run by your sales and marketing departments. Regardless of what your business does, there will likely be a person, departments of people, or entire buildings full of people whose job is to attend to customer issues. This is the perfect time to perfect your brand.

Without fail, high-effort consumer behavior follows a five-step process. If you haven’t read anything I’ve written on high-effort consumer behavior, the way consumers process high-effort behavior is through what’s called central-route processing. This is just a fancy way of saying that you have to really think deeply about a decision. This is opposed to low-effort consumer behavior, which uses peripheral route processing; this basically means a consumer doesn’t think much about their purchase. The five steps involved in high-effort consumer behavior are:

Problem recognition
Information search
Consideration set
Purchase
Post-purchase

This last and final step of post-purchase is where so many organizations don’t focus enough energy on improving their brand. This is not just an opportunity to make customers happy, but it’s an opportunity to make longer-term incremental sales. For high-effort behavior, many companies have the opportunity to solidify their brand when there is something wrong. As a company, you are always going to have things go wrong. Something is going to break. As humans, we get it, not all products are perfect. However, with high-effort behavior, each step is as important as every other step. If a company exceeds expectations after a product is purchased, it is likely going to lead to more purchases in the future. This can also lead to the most powerful marketing available, positive word-of-mouth marketing, or personal recommendations.

However, forget the furthering the brand conversation for a minute, this is also an opportunity to sell. You have customers calling you, and regardless of if they are having a good experience or a bad experience, they are calling you and no outreach is really necessary. Are you using this opportunity to let them know about something new that you are launching? Obviously, you have to be tactful about this and train your customer service people on how to read the room. You can’t have somebody try to sell anything to someone that is pissed off about something that impacts your brand. However, if you solved their problem, what better way to make a sale than to simply mention something that could turn into another sale? Credit card companies have this figured out. If you ever have an issue where you need to talk to someone, they will almost always try to sell you on their rewards card. However, you don’t have to take it to that annoying level. You could simply just ask for permission to email them some information on a new product that you are launching.

Let’s take this customer service reps as salespeople thing to a whole new level. How about keeping logs in your CRM for customers that you’ve helped? You can use this CRM to track outbound communication from the customer service team to proactively pitch new products. You could simply filter your customers by satisfied or unsatisfied. For the satisfied customers, your customer service team could send an email saying something like Hey (customer’s name), my name is (customer service rep name) and I helped you with (insert issue-from a category list) back in (insert month). We’re launching a new product that solves (insert problem here) and we have special introductory pricing through the end of the month. Would you like to find out more? With variable data and smart content, you could easily do this pretty much exactly like I just listed. Smart content would fill everything you had from a spreadsheet and voila, you’ve got a marketing and sales email sent directly from the customer service team.

However, in many companies, it doesn’t work this way. This primarily happens because most companies operate in silos. The marketing group is focused on data and advertising. The sales group is focused on net new conversions or increasing market share. The customer service team is focused on retention. The operations staff is focused on efficiencies. Instead, by removing the silos and thinking through the entire high-effort consumer behavior process, you can create a better and more efficient way of making sure you’ve covered every part of the process.

Your Brand is Your Attitude

Let’s put your company aside and talk about your personal brand. You will, more than likely, have a career and a personal brand that lasts much longer than your relationship with your current company. Your personal brand is made up of mostly your attitude. Sure, it’s other things like your talent, your education, and how your brain works. However, all of these things can come crumbling down if you are steered by the wrong attitude. Your attitude is what drives your success. If you are always looking for ways that something is going to fail or isn’t possible, you are going to stifle yourself and your career. You’re going to be a person that is miserable to be around, and this is going to likely translate to your personal life. Having an attitude that holds other people back is also holding you back. It’s making you depressed and it doesn’t have to be this way.

However, if you have a welcoming attitude that is open to new ideas, inclusion, and always striving to be the best, you will achieve greater success and probably have some fun along the way. People don’t just want to work with smart people. People want to work with and work for, others that are fun to be around. We want to work with people that can cheer us up when we are having a bad day. We want to work with someone who loves jumping in and solving problems. We want to align ourselves with someone that presents ideas that are just crazy enough to work.

In some cases, you likely spend more time with some of the people that you work with than you do with your family. I agree, this seems a little crazy, but it’s just kind of how the world works. Just like a spouse would rather be around someone that has a good attitude, so do your coworkers and you should want this out of the people that you work with too. You are a team and the team is greater than the individual team members. Every day, you have the opportunity to choose your attitude, and every day, you are building your personal brand with your colleagues, customers, and vendors.

How Your Personal Brand Coincides with Your Company’s Brand

So what is your company’s brand? Well…it’s you. It’s your friend that works in sales. It’s your neighbor that works in the shipping department. It’s your cousin’s wife that works in the accounting department. It’s people. Your company’s brand is the collection of all of these people choosing their attitude and representing the company. Your company relies on you and every one of the people that it employs to represent them in a certain way. This is where brand and culture training is critical. You should know your company values. As stated earlier, these are the basic fundamental building blocks of how your company expects you to represent them. If you are working for the right company, your values should be aligned. If not, well…you should probably be working somewhere else.

If your values are in alignment, any growth to your personal brand will likely benefit your company as well. Whether it be getting an education, volunteering, or posting educational articles on LinkedIn called “Your Brand is Not Your Logo” to try and help other people, the growth of your personal brand will have incremental growth on your company’s brand. Just imagine if everyone in the company had the drive to grow their personal brand. What if everyone in the company tried to better themselves? What if everyone tried to have fun? What if everyone had a positive attitude? Well…then you’d have one amazing brand.

Wrapping Up

So your brand is not your logo. It’s not any component of what makes your company’s visual identity. It’s something that you can’t completely control. Your brand is your product or service, but it’s not your product or service. It is your product or service because the thing you have to sell is a major customer touchpoint. However, it isn’t your product or service because, in some respects, those are just representations of what your company represents. They’re just a part of what your brand was, is, and will be.

What’s behind all of this and what makes your brand possible is the people. Your brand is the people that work for the company, regardless if it involves tens of thousands of people or a sole proprietor. These companies aren’t run by robots (yet), they’re run by people. These people have hopes and dreams. They have families. They have hobbies. They’re just like you. Some employees might not have the education that someone else does. They might not have the technical knowledge that others have. They might not have the title or salary that someone else has. What everyone does have, however, is the ability to be kind. We have the ability to tell a dad joke. We have the ability to help someone that is in need. If your brand is your people, make sure that you are attracting, retaining, and cultivating a workplace that is inclusive, open to new ideas, and just fun to be around. If you can do this, you’ve figured out the secret to how to create a strong brand.

Why You Still Want That Rolex

How Rolex Sells Watches by Creating Problems

I was 16 years old when my dad came home from New York with a gift. He opened his bag. “I thought you needed a new watch”, he said and handed me this gorgeous silver and gold watch.

“Woah, this is a Rolex,” I was surprised. At 16, the only thing I really knew about Rolex was that they were expensive. How expensive? I had no idea, but I probably shouldn’t be wearing this to my job at the grocery store where I pushed carts and stocked shelves.

He just kind of laughed. My mom laughed too. “It’s not real,” he said.

“What do you mean, it’s not real?” I asked. Still, I had no idea what was going on. Well, he didn’t get me a Rolex. As my friend Brendan put it, he got me a Fauxlex. Yep, a fake Rolex. It looked real to me, but I was pretty clueless. I’d never seen the real thing. Now, I’m almost 40 and I’ve still only seen a few real Rolex’s. At least, I think they were real.

I really didn’t care that it was fake. I thought it would be impressive if I could pull one over on someone. I wore it to school. I wore it to work. I didn’t really fool anyone. It clashed with my hoodies, Led Zeppelin tee shirts, and my giant green Doc Martens. Since it wasn’t fooling anyone, I leaned into the joke. I wore that Fauxlex everywhere until it finally met its demise falling 3 feet onto the concrete when I was banging on the glass at a minor league hockey game. It never really worked ever again.

Even at 16, I knew one thing about the Rolex brand. It’s what Rolex has built their brand on for over 100 years. A Rolex was a sign that you had “arrived”. You wore a Rolex because you could wear a Rolex. I knew that even at a time when a watch was more necessary than it is today, that the Rolex brand didn’t really fit much of a practical need. My Folex told time just as well until it broke. So how had they made such an aspirational association with a clueless 16-year-old when I wasn’t their target audience?

Rolex Creates Problems

Problems. As marketers, we’re pretty good at creating them. It’s a technique known as poisoning the well. The strategy is thousands of years old. You essentially tell someone their well is poisoned and that you are the only one that has the antidote. In high-effort consumer behavior, problem recognition is the first step in the purchasing journey. However, some products that involve high-effort behavior do not necessarily involve a practical problem, so problems have to be created. The way marketers typically create problems is by telling you that what you have is not enough. They then make a promise that what they are selling will make you fill in the blank: (happier, healthier, thinner, more successful, etc.)

So, how does Rolex do this? Does anyone need a Rolex? For that matter, does anyone ever really need a watch? Seriously though, there are ways to tell time all around us. We have clocks on our phones, tablets, in our car, just about everywhere. So how does a company like Rolex still exist? Does anyone need an archaic, analog device, that costs $7,500 for the “base” model? Although they have built a strong brand for over 100 years, how does a product thrive to be a $5 billion-dollar company when by all accounts, it should be on its way to obsolescence? Rolex has done what every high-effort consumer behavior expert dreams of doing. In my opinion, they nailed step one of creating problems.

One of their messaging strategies involves the same tactics any motivational speaker uses to get you to buy their products. It’s the “dress for the job you want, not the job you have” method. This strategy is on full display in their “Every Rolex Tells a Story” campaign where they feature people that have “made it”. Check out this ad with James Cameron.

https://youtu.be/RgpoRGq3oBs

So what did they do here? Again, it’s the “dress for the job you want” tactic. Wow, James Cameron. Who doesn’t want that kind of success? Since he’s doing an ad for Rolex, the watch must have somehow contributed to his success, right? They’re planting the seed that James Cameron and everyone else that is part of this campaign can attribute their success to Rolex. The beauty of what they are doing is that they are communicating that message (associating success with Rolex) without overtly saying this. If you hadn’t thought of what they were doing with this type of ad, would you be able to recognize this tactic? Maybe, but Rolex isn’t relying on their advertising appealing to logic. They’re relying on their advertising to appeal to emotion.

They do a fantastic job of convincing affluent consumers that if they don’t have a Rolex, they haven’t arrived. This strategy has been so successful that the basic concept of their messaging has never really changed. Rolex spends big money advertising in high-net-worth sporting events, publications, and websites. The way they advertise relies heavily on indirect normative influences. They realize that the person that is purchasing the Rolex is heavily influenced by the group of people they associate with. It’s the whole “if your friend jumped off a bridge, would you?” lecture that your mom gave you when you would blame your behavior on your friends. It’s not an uncommon strategy. For example, many companies do this with an overarching message of sustainability. Toyota does this with Prius. Burt’s Bees does this with everything they sell. Rolex just has a much smaller niche, and in my opinion, they do it better than anyone else.

High-effort consumer behavior, like the decision to buy a $7,500 watch, relies on problems. Sometimes, though, your problem involves a legitimate need. You need a car for transportation, your computer quit working and you need to finish your work, or your phone battery won’t hold a charge anymore and it can’t be used for more than an hour off of the charger. Although the way that you arrive at the problem when there is a legitimate unmet need is different than a manufactured problem, the way you buy things is the same. Rolex is just amazing at creating perceived problems that only they can solve. It doesn’t really matter if the problem is real or not.

Photo by **hassan mehdi** from **Pexels**

Consumers are Lazy

Once a problem is realized, the second step of a high-effort behavior is to look for information on how to solve your problem. This type of search could really be anything. It could be internal, like remembering past experiences or ads. It could be external, like getting a referral from a friend or researching alternatives online.

You might think that we put in a lot of effort into making a major purchase but that’s not really the case. There’s a term in cognitive psychology called the “Cognitive Miser”. Our minds are considered to be cognitive misers. This essentially means that when we make decisions, we’re sort of lazy, regardless of our intelligence. In general, we would much rather put in little effort to solve our problems than putting in extra effort and meaning. (Stanovich, 2009)[1]

This can’t really be true, can it? Yep. It’s true. What’s one of your biggest monthly bills? I’m guessing you said mortgage, well, either that or daycare. You would think that we do a considerable amount of research when finding a home lender, right? Nope. Definitely not. Our brains want to take the easy way out and find a solution that is good enough. One major study found that the average number of sources the consumer consulted when selecting a place that was likely going to determine the amount of their largest monthly expense…was two. (Lee & Hogarth 2000)[2] Yep, two. Let that sink in.

analogue chrome dial focus — Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

How Can You Use This Information?

Alright, let’s say you’re a marketer and your potential customer realizes there is a problem, whether you created the problem or not. The next step is to be able to nail the information search portion of the high-effort consumer behavior journey. Now you know the secret that all good marketers know. If consumers only check out two sources before they make a purchase, and one of those sources is yours, you’re pretty much halfway there. So, the question is, how are you going to provide this information? Is it going to be through video? An informative blog, or series of blogs? Email to a customer curated list? Social media? Old-fashioned snail mail?

For a well-defined niche market, I usually take an omnichannel approach. This is a just fancy way of saying all of the above. Why? It doesn’t take an in-depth analysis of consumer behavior to understand that people are all different. While some prefer reading in-depth articles, others will skim just for the key points and takeaways. Some need the information delivered directly to their email, some want it sent to their desk, some want to watch an informative video, and some would prefer the interaction and community found on social media. This has been especially effective when you are dealing with a niche market because regardless of the medium, you are not dealing with massive media budgets. The types of markets I work with max out around 5,000 target consumers. I often work with targets of 500 or less. That takes a pretty targeted media approach, one where you can cover just about every type of communication for a pretty reasonable budget.

Can You Combine the Two?

Realizing that consumers are lazy, Rolex has done an excellent job in combining both step one and step two. Their advertisements create problems but they offer solutions. The solution, conveniently, is to buy their watches. One clever headline reads: “A Rolex will never change the world. We leave that to the people that wear them.” As a consumer, this plays to my ego and I just realized that I have a problem. I want to change the world, but I’m not changing the world. Bingo, step one of high-effort consumer behavior, check! How about step two? Well, they just told you. People that change the world wear Rolexes. Are we that gullible? Maybe. Maybe not. Are we that lazy? See Cognitive Miser theory.

What’s Next?

Once we realize there is a problem and consume information on how to solve that problem, we reduce our alternatives down to a few. This is typically 2-8 alternatives, which we often call the consideration set[3] (Allen et al., 1991). However, if you’ve already built your brand to be a frontrunner like Rolex, if you get to this stage, you’re going to have a higher probability to make the sale.

The final steps involved in a high-effort purchase are the actual purchase and post-purchase behavior. The interesting thing about the post-purchase behavior of Rolex customers is that the product is so coveted that the owner will always want it to be seen or noticed. By wearing a Rolex, they’re walking advertisements for the brand. Given the price point of the watch, it is highly likely that the person wearing it is monetarily successful. This perpetuates everything that the brand stands for.

Takeaways

For high-effort behavior, the first step in the customer journey is to get someone to realize there is a problem. Once that problem has been recognized, a consumer tries to find a way to solve that problem. Then, they narrow their choices and buy a product. How can you help them along the way? If you can do this as well as Rolex, you can roll the first two or three steps into one, giving you a greater likelihood of being chosen over your competition.

[1] Stanovich, Keith E. (2009). “The cognitive miser: ways to avoid thinking”. What intelligence tests miss: the psychology of rational thought. New Haven: Yale University Press. pp. 70–85. ISBN 9780300123852. OCLC 216936066.

[2] Lee, Jinkook & Hogarth, Jeanne M. Consumer Information Search for Home Mortgages: Who, What, How Much and What Else? Autumn 2000 Financial Services Review, Volume 9, Issue 3. Pp. 277-293.

[3] Shocker, Allan, Ben-Akiva, Moshe, Boccara, Bruno and Nedungadi, Prakash. 1991. Consideration Set Influences on Consumer Decision-Making and Choice: Issues, Models, and Suggestions. Marketing Letters: A Journal of Research in Marketing, Vol. 2, No. 3: 181-197.