Pavlov’s People
Deepend Group’s General Manager and renowned digital strategist, Dan Robathan, looks at Pavlovian conditioning and how brands can leverage a consumer’s past experiences to their advantage.
People don’t get to decide how they immediately react to something, even our most pragmatic responses are not initiated consciously. Humans are slaves to a combination of their biology and the sum of their life experiences.
Pavlov’s famous experiments proved that through conditioning you can evoke a physical and emotional reaction without the source of an experience being present. If the mind has made a connection, the subject will react or feel a certain way, meaning we’re vulnerable to manipulation.
Getting people to feel a certain way, do a certain thing, buy something, tell someone about something is an ambition shared by marketers across the globe. Ultimately if a piece of communication doesn’t elicit a reaction, an emotional response, it has failed.
Borrowing from some of Pavlov’s thinking, here are five tips for leveraging people’s experiences for your own marketing advantage;
1. Get to know your dogs (persona development) — often overlooked as unnecessary strategic waffle, it’s essential to know the intent and motivations of a target audience to trigger a response.
2. Get them eating (taking action) — it is universally acknowledged that if we take action, do something, we are more likely to be affected by it. This means we are more conducive to forming a connection with that experience.
3. Keep providing the same food (repetition) — while there is a tipping point, putting the same thing in front of an audience a number of times increases the chances their brains will make a connection. For example, Pavlov’s furry friends didn’t start salivating the first time the bell rang but eventually they did. The trick is to stop before the experience becomes a negative one.
4. Earn the dogs trust (advocacy) — if someone we know, tells us about something, our connection to the ‘thing’ comes preloaded with the feelings we have for that person. Hence why a brand recommendation from a friend is worth five times that of a piece of paid communication.
5. Sometimes the dogs just aren’t hungry (media planning) — make sure the communication or work is put in front of the right audience at the right time and in the right context — it’s critical.
A digital-centric approach is the only way to leverage all of the above in one campaign. You can’t ignore above-the-line channels but when digital sits at the heart of your thinking, you have a much better chance at borrowing from the positive reinforcement someone’s previous experiences have created.
