#but like. pretending that ads primarily target conscious logico-deductive thinking Drives Me Up The McFucking Wall sometimes

[harmonic-psyche]

*Grabs your shoulders so hard they bleed*

I T ' S F U C K I N G A S S O C I A T I V E

Before the development of modern psychology, ads (e.g. in the early 20th century) often looked like persuasive essays. Back then, advertisers commonly thought that persuasion is about convincing someone to consciously make one rational decision instead of another.

After the development of modern psychology, advertisers largely left the essays behind and turned to brute association.

For example, a McDonald's billboard I frequently pass literally just has the McDonald's logo, a picture of a burger, and text saying "Mmmmm. Also, mmmmm." With no context, that sounds like a shitpost!

So what's association and how do advertisers use it?

When you experiencs multiple things together, experiencing one of them again will remind you of the other(s). That's true for seeing certain colors in a certain shape, for thinking about a certain topic, and for feeling certain emotions.

You also tend to perceive things as more similar to each other when you associate them together. For example, in “a wide variety of contexts...people exhibit a binary bias:” “we tend to underestimate the difference between two facts...given the same categorical label, while we overestimate the difference between the same two facts…given different [ones].”

It's all about vibes. IMO, people who say “vibes” usually mean their associations. Something gives you “bad vibes” to the exact degree that you associate it with unpleasant sights/thoughts/feelings/etc. It re-minds you of them because it brings them to mind.

Conversely, positive associations (“good vibes”) often cause a “halo effect” making something seem better, easier, and truer.

Familiarity alone is sometimes enough to induce positive associations. In his highly influential book Thinking Fast And Slow, which laid the groundwork for behavioral economics, Daniel Kahneman calls this “cognitive ease”:

Let's return to ads. The advertiser's main goal is twofold:

“When a customer thinks about the product/service they want, our product/service should come to mind.”

“Our product/service should have positive associations in the customer's mind, so the customer finds it appealing.”

A McDonald's advertiser hopes that (1) the feeling of hunger cravings reminds you of burgers which reminds you of McDonald's; and (2) remembering McDonald's will feel good.

So, they create ads to associate…

Hunger cravings with burgers

Burgers with the satisfaction of hunger

Burgers with McDonald's

McDonald's with happiness, fun, nostalgia, and other good feelings

Remember that McDonald's billboard I mentioned? It does at least three of those. It associates McDonald's (via the logo) with burgers (via the picture) and with satisfaction of hunger (via the "Mmmmm" text).

An advertiser who views their job through the lens of rational or conscious persuasion is usually not an effective advertiser.

hirosensei said: I still don’t understand what ads are supposed to do besides let me know that something exists if I didn’t already know about it.

advertising does let you know that something exists, but obviously the way it's traditionally applied goes way beyond that: in your daily life you're already gonna see people driving BMWs and drinking Coke and wearing Nike and yet still get reminders of the existence of these products every day for the rest of your life, why?

the folk explanation of advertising is that it conveys a message, typically explicit in the text and reinforced in the subtext, that the product in question will make you happy and successful and admired and sexy and people respond to that by buying the product, but that's obviously still too simplistic as we've all seen advertising for products we have no interest in and no intention of ever buying and most markets are competitive and there's more than one option and they all advertise, so what gives?

we can get more sophisticated by considering advertising as a dynamic equilibrium like an arms race or an ecosystem where Coke and Pepsi both need to keep advertising even though it isn't helping them gain an edge over the other simply because if they stopped they would fall behind, like trees wasting energy competing to be the tallest for sunlight when in an ideal world they would all agree to keep the forest canopy as low as possible.

or you can see advertising as akin to a potlatch, where the amount spent on it is a costly signal of the power and wealth of the brand, in itself demonstrating confidence and success more than anything that might be in the actual ad itself; corporations burning wealth to convince you that they are winners and you would be wise to affiliate with them.

or we can get a little introspective and consider that advertising isn't just to convince you to buy the product, it's to convince the people who do buy the product that you're convinced that they are cool people, such that they buy it not because advertising works on them (they're too cool to be won over!) but because they believe it works on you (you're impressionable!) except of course that all happens at the subconscious level as it sounds silly when spelled out explicitly.

other explanations for advertising (besides that it works) are that it makes the people running the brand feel good about themselves and is another form of compensation for them, either by boosting their image or giving them the excuse to dabble in the creative arts or liaise with actors or musicians or athletes they normally would have no reason to contact.

and similar analysis applies to all forms of design and marketing, not just obvious stuff like TV ads but logos, color schemes, custom corporate fonts, web design, everything orthogonal to a product that costs money and shapes the way that it is perceived in the market.