There are a variety of routes from prime to subsequent thoughts, feelings, motives and behaviour 28 from sophisticated highways based on subtle relations to more pedestrian, simple links. For example, ‘Bye!’ can prime ‘buy’ (Davis & Herr, 2014) and seeing the brand name ‘Froot’ can prime the idea of fruit (Baxter, Ilicic, & Kulczynski, 2017). Why? We’ll look at this in the next section on theory which needs to incorporate and explain the evidence base discussed here.
Many brands are distinctive and carry an identity with them which can be primed but brand slogans can have a reverse priming effect. So the image of Walmart , according to Laran , Dalton, and Andrade (2011a) is a cost saver store. But their slogan ‘Save money – live better’ is read as a persuasion tactic by consumers who then compensate to correct for that. Savvy readers at this point will recognise that persuasive messages in advertising for example will be dealt with by adult aware consumers using strategies such as counter-arguing and erecting what are sometimes called cognitive defences. We do this frequently whether the source of the persuasive communication is advertising, or a devious politician. But the claims made by Laran et al. (2011a, p. 1000) suggested that once the cognitive defence is erected, which is a simple routine that is used frequently and consistently then it can becomes nonconscious. Slogans fit the bill and we have process-without-awareness called reverse priming . In other words there could be a paradoxical effect when marketing tactics will activate processes that can correct for persuasion, and this might not work to the company’s advantage. To return to Walmart, although the brand tends to encourage thriftiness, the slogan encourages the opposite i.e. indulgence (Laran et al., 2011b). The former uses the conventional priming route but the latter automatically will induce the process of reverse priming .
Anthropomorphisation is attributing real or imagined behavior of nonhuman agents with humanlike characteristics that can cover motivations, intentions, or emotions (Epley , Waytz, & Cacioppo , 2007, p. 864). This tendency covers a variety of things such as pets, computers, machines (BBC Worldwide, 2010, June 4) and, and of course brands. It has been theorised extensively by Epley et al. (op. cit.) and in a sense the process releases and carries across the qualities of things into the domain of people which is an area more semantically rich in description and has greater emotional, cognitive and motivational potential. These ‘things’ can be relatively abstract like stocks which are given human qualities. Epley et al. cite the example of “…the NASDAQ flirted with the 2,000 mark” (op. cit., p. 867) and further examples are found in Morris , Sheldon, Ames, and Young (2007). Brand anthropomorphisation has a good coverage in the literature and my selection here is limited to its role in priming. The origins here can be identified in the seminal work of both Aaker (1997) and Fournier (1998) although earlier anthropological work on animism (e.g. Guthrie , 1993) where the distinction between animate and inanimate is blurred by attributing living qualities to inanimate objects is also relevant. Aaker (1997) found that descriptions of brands could be analysed into 5 basic personality dimensions which can be called Sincerity, Excitement, Competence, Sophistication, and Ruggedness. Although these describe the underlying factors, each factor can also be described with a cluster of associated adjectives. Consequently brand analysis and brand positioning can be looked at and questions of the cross-cultural validity of these measures explored. Fournier (1998) on the other hand explored how findings in the literature on social and interpersonal relationships could apply to attitudes and emotions toward brands. Using in-depth investigation of individual consumers she makes a compelling case that brands are integrated into everyday living and occupy an important role in the way relationships are articulated. Her work provides an insightful view of the role brands occupy in family life. Aggarwal and McGill (2011) were interested in brands that were anthropomorphised by consumers and the extent to which these human-like qualities could prime subsequent associated behaviour. Although some of the results are predictable such as priming Kellogg’s which is associated with health being related to preference for using the stairs rather than the lift, the model used is complex involving some brands that are liked and others that are disliked. In my opinion, although the research is an exciting development there is some way to go before we completely understand the extent to which we can relate to brands in a similar way we relate to humans. Epley et al. (2007, Table 1) use four dimensions including developmental to categorise the independent variables in any anthropomorphism research. They are situational (where you are e.g. a supermarket) and dispositional (what sort of person you are e.g. having a high need for cognition) determinants as well as developmental (your stage of development e.g. a preschool child or an old person) and cultural (your shared background e.g. Chinese ) factors. I have found these very useful in framing research issues in consumer psychology.
The self is a multi-faceted concept and has been defined in various ways. For our purposes we shall examine self-construal 29 which is usually the term used when the different ways cultures use the idea of self are discussed. The two main ways are called independent and interdependent although relational is sometimes used as well. Independent refers to construing the self as separate from others in my in-group inasmuch as my wishes, my desires , and my opinions are of primary importance to me. Interdependent construal is where the in-group member is frequently aware of the needs and desires of others and group goals predominate. Relational self-construal (Cross , Bacon, & Morris , 2000) often occurs with pairs of people where for example one might define herself as stemming from her relationship with her partner, colleague, best friend or mother. The independent and interdependent aspects of the self can be primed (Oyserman & Lee, 2008, pp. 315–317) using techniques such as word identification or sorting where the independent group deliberately received words that covered individualism and the interdependent group were given words where the emphasis was on the collective. The conclusions from these two authors’ meta-analysis were nuanced to put it mildly (Oyserman & Lee, op. cit., pp. 329–331) and any simplistic generalisations about ‘Eastern’ versus ‘Western’ ways of thinking should be avoided. People across the world are capable of construing their own selves in different ways and the two main ways of interdependent construing and independent construing 30 are available to all of us. The difference lies in the situations where these occur and any analysis of a culture needs to look at the different cultural levels and what cultural pressures there are to consider others in decision making or achieve a solitary goal . Even at just one level, the level of family, there are cultural pressures within an extended family to consider uncles’, cousins’, second cousins’ needs and wants when making up your own mind. This induces an interdependent mind-set that is worlds away from the smaller nuclear arrangement where parents invest in their one child who is then encouraged to seek her own way in the world. 31 Of course some groups of children are raised in a highly individualistic, self-centred, high individual achievement setting and thrive and never leave so that interdependent construing rarely if ever gets a chance to emerge or is only encouraged in restricted settings such as religious rituals. Others will thrive in a traditional culture where one learns how to behave and more importantly, survive in an environment where one knows one’s place and is locked into a complex system of roles and expectations with others and live out their lives in this so-called traditional cultural environment. Thankfully most of us will be somewhere between these two extremes.
So how do brands and consumption fit into this picture? Kettle and Häubl (2011) discovered that the simple act of signing primes the self , 32 which then increases the definition and clarity of your self-concept as it increases in salience. The result that is found is that you will linger longer over apparel that you feel is just you and also identify more strongly with things your in-group would wear and correspondingly avoid goods you think members of your out-group would choose. Self-priming is recognised although perhaps not explicitly as such when terms such as ‘personalised offer’ are used. Ma
rketing using the internet where personalised promotional messages can be distributed in a customised way should then result in this high resolution vision of the self by the end user—the interested consumer . Chang (2010) primed the interdependent and independent aspects of the self by getting participants to read stories in a magazine. One group read a story where individual success was emphasised and the other dealt with a theme that friendship through adversity is highly valued. 33 Results fitted in with the general principle that when an independent self is salient then you focus on gains but when the interdependent aspect dominates then you emphasise in your consumption strategies avoidance of risk (see also Aaker & Lee , 2001).
That concludes this section on evidence for priming and I’ll try and put it all together in the next section which looks at theories behind this fascinating phenomenon.
What Would a Theory of Brand Priming Look Like?
I have chosen the title deliberately as I don’t think we’re there yet. Although Bargh (2006) argued that we had answers to many basic questions concerning priming he also said that there are a lot of second-generation questions that needed answering, including the ontogeny 34 of these effects and how and why they developed (op. cit., p. 148). There is certainly plenty of research on priming and even the relatively smaller area of brand priming includes many research publications that I have not had the space to cite or describe. Much of this research though focusses on manipulating variables in an experimental setting in the hope that the accumulation of these relatively small and restricted data will eventually contribute to a bigger picture of how the mind works when we consume. However we need to see the bigger picture and what contributions these small and valuable studies can potentially make to our understanding.
Imagine 35 you are in one of the world’s top malls . Here’s what it’s like in a composite picture drawn from descriptions of the biggest and best malls around the world. You are walking in crowds of people, probably around a vast atrium with a heightened sense of verticality with high ceilings and lower floors below you. There are the smells of people and food, the sounds of voices of children, young people and adults from different parts of the world. You have to decide what to do apart from shop and you can ice-skate, roller-skate, ski, play golf, swim, or watch movies. You can view art, not-so-wild animals and fish, movies in multiplexes, and eat breakfast, lunch and dinner and drink alcohol all day. You can dance the night and day away….
The sensory stimulation as you are walking and moving almost continuously is immense and the analysis of the visual perceptual system by Gibson (see Chapter 3, section on “Perception”) would do justice to the changing arrays of sensory stimulation you experience. There is stimulation in every channel. You will touch clothes, feel objects, and bump into others in this mix of entertainment and shopping. And brands are everywhere. We expect them and anticipate this branded environment if we are savvy consumers and shoppers. Our conscious minds are planning as we talk with our partner and children and decide on where what and when to do things. It is not that strange an environment and we will have encountered parts of it as we go to the supermarkets and shops in our local town, and meet our friends and family at home and at leisure. We might recognise some of the goods from the airport experience of waiting for delayed flights. So we have scripts for different parts of the experience but probably not for the whole experience which can be both engaging and frustrating.
Our minds are working non-stop as we experience all this and much of the work is going on without us being consciously aware of it. Brands are there but we anticipate that as we are in a branded consumption ecology and it would be strange if there weren’t. So Burberry , Hermes , Louis Vuitton can enter our minds without our awareness. Also McDonald’s and Starbucks . From the evidence reviewed here we know that brands will evoke a variety of associations at different levels from simple colours like the green of Starbucks logo suggesting a ‘green’ attitude toward the environment to deeper social judgments about why McDonald’s and Hermes don’t quite go together or why McDonald’s yellow logo is now on a green background (if the mall is in Europe). We also know from theories of priming that these transitory mental changes are spread throughout a vast mental network in a process called spreading activation. 36 One of the consequences of this process is that other areas of thinking, feeling, and intending-to-act are also activated. One idea triggers another, associated one which then activates others in an unimaginably complex network. So each of our happy band of visitors to the world’s best mall have completely different thoughts, feelings, and intentions? The problem is best phrased by Bargh et al. (2006, p. 158) who suggested that the range of possible courses of action that mind can continuously generate needs to be reduced to accommodate that unfortunate fact that you can only do one thing at a time.
There are several ways we can solve this problem. One is to look for basic universal processes that can override this web-spinning mode of thought. The other is to introduce another more mindful way of thinking so we have more than one way of processing the wilder excesses of the branded environment. The latter is often called dual process theory as it involves (at least) two kinds of mental processing and will be looked at in Chapter 5. So let’s see what ways there are to make sense of our wandering thoughts with basic universal processes.
One is what could be called a hot link between perceiving and doing. This is most easily detected when we see others behave and do the same, and it can be found in sport psychology for example where action becomes more likely when it is imagined. Techniques of guided imagery can be used to improve performance. Children show imitative behaviour from an early age. However although we can bypass the networks of spreading activation, there needs to be a solution that resolves what Bargh (2006) calls ‘the reduction problem ’.
Bargh (2006) suggests that an analysis using goal -directed behaviour can resolve a lot of this problem and in consumer psychology we have plenty of goals that consumers wish to achieve based on both the shopping experience and the goods and services that emerge from that. The role of selective attention in goal -directed behaviour is also important and as we explore the routines and sub-routines involved in doing even simple consumer activities like paying for stuff, ordering from a menu, trying on and choosing clothes as well as the complex social interactions if you are in a group then we soon realise that the structure of goal directed consumer behaviour requires servicing from a rich variety of primed and available links sourced from our perceptual worlds and gaining meaning from the mind. In addition the thoughts, feelings and intentions sparked off by priming and ramified by spreading activation diffusing through a mental network, have a certain internal logic. The metaphors that guide universal mental activity are not randomly produced and reflect the way our mental worlds work irrespective of how individualistic we are with our wandering thoughts.
Bargh ’s more general writings on the nature of goals and their history in humankind (e.g. Huang & Bargh, 2014) suggest that conscious goal setting and pursuit evolved later. In other words at some time in our history as a species we became aware of making up our minds. However the more ancient unconscious process was still there and the properties of both systems were similar. This implies that more than one process is present in the mind of today’s consumer and we shall now address this by looking what has been called dual process theory in consumer research.
Notes
1.I must confess to being guilty of this and retiring to the word processor when faced with pressing problems like plumbing, painting and generally making sure the home was fit for purpose.
2.See Durkheim’s distinction between sacred and profane summarised in the section “Émile Durkheim and Sacred/Profane” in Chapter 2.
3.One of the great developmental psychologists, Jean Piaget argued that the child grew up and went through several inevitable periods of mental development before finally emerging in adolescence as a potential adult thinker with the full equipment of formal operational thinking
where thought was abstract and obeyed several rules that formed systems that could be described using formal logico-mathematical structures. It would be difficult to translate this model into one that’s appropriate for different species.
4.See the last line of Jaques’ speech in Shakespeare’s As You Like It.
5.My own example.
6.There is some evidence (Núñez & Sweetser, 2006) that Aymara, a South American language conceptualises the future as behind and the past as in front. I have some evidence (Young, 1986) that Chinese participants located time-marked concepts ‘in their mind’s eye’ with a tendency for future ones as behind and past ones as in front. However the picture is confounded with the ‘time as stream’ metaphor. Are you in the stream and it passes you? Or do you both go along together? In other words is the speaker talking as an observer or participant?
7.Johnson (1987) (cited by Van Rompay et al., op. cit., p. 920) claimed that verticality constituted a metaphorical schema found frequently to connote power and success.
8.A conceptual metaphor is where concepts in one domain e.g. aspects of economics are described with another usually concrete set of expressions.
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