For all of those who still believe that human mind is a ‘newtonion’ one state machine and who see research as a tool to find out which state a certain consumer is in (preferably count the consumers, find out were they live and send them a message ‘buy my stuff’, a few examples to attack their view on the world.
The way we percieve pain is extremely dependent on context. If you look at your painful hand with a looking glass the pain grows, if you look at it with the opposite (making your hand look smaller) the pain diminish. (example form Dave Snowden’s blog, more to be found there)
Taste of any food is highly dependent on context. Beer drinkers are not able in a double blind test to find their own beer within others. But if they drink it branded, the taste difference is big. Old school would say: the consumer is stupid. However, neuroscience has prooved other wise: you really taste something different. The taste really changes when it is branded.
Taste is not a fixed state thing, neither is pain, neither is any of the most important motivators for buying anything. As a marketing director you should be more than aware that the concepts you are dealing with are highly dualistic, highly ambigeous and you can never trust on simple ideas.
Tags: Add new tag, ambiguity, duality
[...] In marketing, perception is reality. Brand is an accumulation of perceptions. Jochum Stienstra discussed in a recent post how those perceptions create a profound, cognitive reality for customers. So, in focusing on the [...]