Low-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.

Special Categories:

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

How Your Brain Hijacks What You Buy

And That’s Not Necessarily a Bad Thing

For a good portion of my career, I fell into the trap of thinking that good marketing was driven by great advertising, so I would spend all of my time focusing on how to create a good ad. I’d carefully try and choose an image with stopping power, a clever headline, compelling ad copy, and a call to action. I’d do this over and over with mixed results, never thinking about the psychology of consumer behavior and how to use it to make my job easier.

Although I was also really interested in psychology, I had never tried to understand the psychology of why we buy what we buy. It wasn’t until I started getting interested in consumer behavior that I really started to understand the key elements of how the brain works. Having an understanding of consumer behavior allows you to apply an understanding of why customers choose certain products to the building blocks of marketing: product, price, place, and promotion. Fully understanding these concepts can give you an edge to be a better marketer, or just help you grasp why you do what you do.

Low-Effort Consumer Behavior

Consumer behavior is a fascinating topic. There are two main ways that your brain processes purchasing decisions, central-route processing, and peripheral-route processing. In central-route processing, you engage in what’s known as high-effort behavior. This is just a fancy way of saying that you think deeply about your purchases. Peripheral-route processing, however, considers little thought (Petty & Cacioppo 1986: 191).[1] It’s the reason that you only buy name-brand peanut butter. It’s the reason you’d never overpay for milk or butter. Ironically, it’s the same reason you’d never be caught buying cheap wine.

You have very little control over how your brain manages peripheral-route processing, so the best that you can do is to try and understand how it works. Typically, low-effort consumer behavior products are everyday items (think groceries, toothpaste, toilet paper — if you can find it), although they don’t have to be. These are purchases that you make every week, if not every day.

Heuristics — The Things You Do That You Don’t Realize

Low-effort purchases rely heavily on heuristics, which is just a pretentious way of saying shortcuts but hey, it makes you sound smart…so we’re going to use it! Heuristics are so subtle that you probably don’t even realize that you are using them. Although they can lead to bad habits and are prone to errors, the fact that you use heuristics isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Think about it, you’d be living a pretty miserable life you agonized over what kind of butter you should buy or spent an hour comparing toothpaste. Consumers just don’t have time to worry about trivial items and although they can be prone to error, heuristics help us manage our time without us having to do much thinking.

Types of Heuristics

Price

Price-related heuristics are incredibly common. If you’re a cheapskate like me, for many low-effort items you buy the cheapest item available. This type of purchasing is commonplace for grocery staples like cans of vegetables, bread, and milk. However, if you again are like me this can translate beyond low-effort items and you end up buying the cheapest (vacuum, cooler, lawnmower, coffee maker) every year for the rest of your life. Earlier I mentioned that heuristics are prone to errors and this is exactly why they don’t always work.

How Marketers Use This

A strategy based on being the low-price leader is one that rarely allows your brand to ever increase your prices in comparison to the market or to gain any value. Committing to being a price leader in a category can be a dangerous strategy that should be based on favorable volumes and variable cost structures. Many companies will attempt to temporarily interrupt lower-priced competitors by offering coupons or sales. This allows them to potentially disrupt a customer’s brand loyalty or purchasing habits. It’s sort of like saying to the consumer, “Hey, you know that brand you always buy sucks, so try ours. It’s better and worth a higher price.”

Brand Loyalty

Brand loyalty is another low-effort purchasing heuristic. Brand loyalty often occurs when we have tried a certain brand and had a great experience. Until that brand lets us down, or we have a better experience with a different brand, we will likely maintain that brand loyalty. It’s the reason that you buy Oreo’s and not “chocolate sandwich cookies” because, well Oreos are great, and chocolate sandwich cookies are trash.

How Marketers Use This

The only reason to have a brand is to build market power and that market power is directly tied to the loyalty that you create with your customers. Your brand should represent something. It should give your customers a reason to not only choose your products but to return to your brand. Building loyalty ultimately strengthens your customer lifetime value and can decrease your customer acquisition cost. That’s fancy marketing speak for “your customers will pay you more money and you will spend less getting new ones”. In addition, the intangible asset of a strong brand can help financial analysts determine the future value of a company. A strong brand commands a higher price over a longer period of time. Another thing to note, a brand has a target audience. It’s not for everyone. If you build a strong enough brand, you may have people that hate your brand, and that’s okay as long as you have people that love your brand. A watered-down brand that tries to appeal to everyone appeals to no one.

Habits

Habits are different than brand loyalty. Although they involve continual purchases, sometimes of the same brand, they don’t necessarily involve loyalty to that brand. A habitual purchase can be the corporate coffee that you drink every day or the junk food from the vending machine that you buy in between meals. It can even be the really bad morning radio show that you listen to every morning. The main difference is that a habit doesn’t require a strong preference for the brand that is being purchased. Habits also involve little evaluation of other options and little information seeking for other alternatives. Habits make decisions easier because it reduces our risk when we have purchased the item several times in the past and it has satisfied our needs (Hoyer, MacInnis, & Pieters 2018).[2]

How Marketers Use This

Marketers of low-effort products spend a lot of time either trying to create or break a habit. Companies that have habitual buyers are always trying to maintain a cycle of perpetuating a customer’s habits. Grocery stores may attempt to maintain a habit of a customer returning to their store by honoring coupons from other stores or matching their prices. If a marketer is trying to break a customer’s habit to get them to purchase their product, they may offer a lower price than a competitive product or offer free samples. If you’re a tobacco company, you might try to do evil things like advertise to children or say that more doctors smoke your cigarette than any other cigarette.

Emotions

Your emotions also have a profound impact on the way you make your purchases. When you are emotionally connected to a brand, you are buying it because it makes you feel good. One example might involve purchasing a Tom’s of Maine product because of their corporate commitment to sustainability. Another example might be buying a local brand as even though the product might be similar to other brands, we might feel better about supporting local members of their community. Your emotions can also cause you to make altruistic choices like donating to charities. Your emotions can also drive you to eat a pint of Ben and Jerry’s you eat when you are having a bad day, or if it’s just a Wednesday.

How Marketers Use This

Companies can attempt to appeal to emotions by adopting a cause that aligns with their product. They may also position their advertising with certain imagery and advertising copy that focuses on how the product makes you feel instead of simply listing the features and benefits. For instance, a pizza restaurant may run a commercial that represents togetherness with images of a family watching a movie. One thing to keep in mind, however, is that several studies have shown that different emotions mean different things to different people (Mogilner & Kamvar, 2012). [3] The challenge for marketers is to determine the temperament of their customers and to understand how emotions impact their purchases.

Unfortunately, consumer’s emotions can also be manipulated by strategies that are purposefully made to misinform the customer. One of the most popular types of this type of manipulation is misleading packaging. A common example is labeling unhealthy foods as fat-free. While this may be true, this label often shows up on foods that are loaded with sugar or sodium. A marketer may believe that a consumer has a negative association with the word fat, and by labeling their product fat free, they are implying that the food is a healthy option. This makes you feel better about your decision.

Normative Influences

Normative influences occur when other people guide our choices. This can be a direct influence, like purchasing something that your kids want. This could also be an indirect influence, like buying a brand because a friend or a group you belong to tend to buy that brand (Hoyer, MacInnis, & Pieters 2018). An example of an indirect influence might be buying an overpriced luxury car because everyone you know, or at least the Jones’s, have one.

How Marketers Use This

Since the person making a purchase isn’t always the decision maker, marketers need to consider advertising to all appropriate audiences. This is why there are so many commercials for cereals and toys during kid’s shows. Even though they are not making the purchase, they are a direct influence on the purchaser. To reinforce an indirect influence, a brand could institute a referral program.

Representativeness

Photo by Preankhan Gowrypalan on Unsplash

The representativeness heuristic is a way that our brains try to link things that are similar together (Tversky & Kahneman, 1974). [4] This is the heuristic that is the reason that hilarious knock offs and intellectual property lawsuits exist. In marketing and branding, this often occurs when a consumer compares a brand to a prototype, or category leader (think Coca Cola for all colas, Kleenex for tissues, and Band-Aid for bandages).

How Marketers Use This

The most common way that marketers use the representativeness heuristic to their advantage is to mimic the prototype brand. Private-label brands often try to make knock offs, like Dr. Thunder, Panburger Partner, Mountain Lightning, and Butter It’s Not. Although these brands are pretty hilarious, they do a great job capitalizing on imitating the prototype and take advantage of a representativeness heuristic.

Availability

Photo by amirali mirhashemian on Unsplash

The availability heuristic happens when a consumer views the probability of having a good experience with a product on how easy information about the product is to recall (Tversky & Kahneman, 1974). For instance, you could have a friend that told you that every time they order from a certain pizza place, they get her order wrong, the pizza was cold, and it took two hours. Would that make you want to place an order with that restaurant? Probably not. This story may influence your future decisions.

How Marketers Use This

To address the availability heuristic, a marketer can try and reinforce the information if it is positive or reframe the information if it is negative. In 2010, Domino’s pizza took extreme steps to address the availability heuristic that their pizza was garbage. To regain credibility, they completely changed their recipes, focusing on their ingredients and flavors (Brandau, 2010).[5]

Humans Are Variety Seeking

For low-effort purchases, unless you are the type of person that has an entire closet full of plain white shirts, you probably seek variety in your purchases. This is the reason there are so many flavors of yogurt, ice cream, soft drinks, and even bread. One study showed that this is particularly true when repetitive purchases are viewed as negative. The boredom of repetition triggers the need to seek variety (Fishbach, 2011).[6]

How Marketers Use This

Coupled with a strong brand, a company can take advantage of a consumer’s need for variety by introducing new items. This could be something like new flavors or seasonal items.

Wrapping Up

Heuristics are a way for consumers to make quick decisions about items that don’t require a lot of thought. They’re almost like a built-in time management system for our brain. They’re not necessarily good, but they’re not inherently bad. At best, they can save you a lot of time and opportunity cost making decisions that would not have a negative impact on your life. At worst, they could lead to habits that turn into harmful addictions. One thing is certain. Your low-effort purchases, which make up most of what you buy, are governed by heuristics. These short cuts are something that are generally out of your control. By understanding the way consumers think about these low-effort decisions, marketers can create more demand for their products.

[1] Cacioppo, J. T., Petty, R. E., Kao, C. F., & Rodriguez, R. (1986). Central and peripheral routes to persuasion: An individual difference perspective. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 51(5), 1032–1043. https://doi-org.prox.lib.ncsu.edu/10.1037/0022-3514.51.5.1032

[2] Hoyer, W., MacInnis, D., & Pieters, R. (2018). Consumer Behavior (Seventh Edition). Cengage Learning: 180–199.

[3] Mogilner, C., Aaker, J., & Kamvar, S. (2012). How Happiness Affects Choice. Journal of Consumer Research, 39(2), 429–443. doi:10.1086/663774

[4] Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1974). Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases. Science, 185(4157), 1124–1131. Retrieved August 2, 2020, from www.jstor.org/stable/1738360

[5] Brandau, M. (2010). Domino’s do-over. Nation’s Restaurant News, 44(5), 44. Retrieved from https://proxying.lib.ncsu.edu/index.php/login?url=https://search-proquest-com.prox.lib.ncsu.edu/docview/229384734?accountid=12725

[6] Fishbach, A., Ratner, R.K. and Zhang, Y. (2011), Inherently loyal or easily bored?: Nonconscious activation of consistency versus variety‐seeking behavior. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 21: 38–48. doi:10.1016/j.jcps.2010.09.006