Advertisers strive to maximize attention and engagement. They want people to remember seeing their ads. They want maximum brand recall. But it’s possible to have marketing impact without ANY of those things.
The marketing media was buzzing last week with news that CBS will promote its fall program lineup via a teeny-weeny video player inserted in an issue of Entertainment Weekly magazine. I know the ad industry is in dire need of some good news, but doesn't anybody else think this is utterly stupid?
I find I close my eyes to “enhance” my other senses. If I’m trying to hear a barely audible voicemail, for example, I often close my eyes. I always assumed that I was merely reducing visual stimuli and hence freeing up my brain to devote more resources to listening.
A few weeks ago Dave Munger at Cognitive Daily had a great post about how naming a smell can help us imagine it in the future. He described research that looked into why it’s fairly difficult for us to identify and imagine scents:
Continuing our survey of neuromarketing books, we recently finished Brand Sense - Build Powerful Brands through Touch, Taste, Smell, Sight, and Sound, by Martin Lindstrom. This data-packed volume was published in 2005, and is based in part on a global research project by Millward Brown which studied the relationship between branding and sensory awareness.
Marketing campaigns often focus primarily on the sense of vision, whether they are purely visual elements like print ads and billboards, or even when they have associated sound, like television commercials or retail environments. I’ve written about olfactory marketing - appealing to the sense of smell - but what about sound?
This may not be news to parents of small kids, but branding is a potent force even among preschool children. A new study of preschoolers in California shows that kids will even eat carrot sticks if they come in a McDonald’s wrapper.
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