I’ve often had a hard time justifying to myself the fact that I spend so much of my time and energy creating advertising.  Does advertising in and of itself provide any social benefit to anyone, or is it just contributing to the clutter and overall deluge information infiltrating every party of our everyday lives?  A college buddy of mine  suggested I look up this article – http://news.cnet.com/8301-13580_3-9849949-39.html – which I found very heartening.  As it turns out, advertising can contribute to the pleasure people experience consuming the goods we advertise:

“ [This] research, along with other studies the authors allude to, are putting a serious dent in economists’ notions that experienced pleasantness of a product is based on its intrinsic qualities.

‘Contrary to the basic assumptions of economics, several studies have provided behavioral evidence that marketing actions can successfully affect experienced pleasantness by manipulating nonintrinsic attributes of goods. For example, knowledge of a beer’s ingredients and brand can affect reported taste quality, and the reported enjoyment of a film is influenced by expectations about its quality,” the researchers said. “Even more intriguingly, changing the price at which an energy drink is purchased can influence the ability to solve puzzles.” ’

-Stephen Shankland quoting a research scientist involved in the research.

I like thinking that if I write a good ad, it could help people enjoy whatever I’m pushing more than they would if they hadn’t seen the ad.

- Article in Full-

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13580_3-9849949-39.html

January 14, 2008 10:55 AM PST

Stephen Shankland

Study: $90 wine tastes better than the same wine at $10

This graph shows the activity in the brain’s pleasure center; there’s more activity with wine subjects think costs $90 a bottle (top line) than the same wine priced at $10. The arrow shows the moment when the subjects started tasting the wine. (Credit: CalTech, Stanford)

In a study that could make marketing managers and salespeople rub their hands with glee, scientists have used brain-scanning technology to shed new light on the old adage, “You get what you pay for.”

Researchers from the California Institute of Technology and Stanford’s business school have directly seen that the sensation of pleasantness that people experience when tasting wine is linked directly to its price. And that’s true even when, unbeknownst to the test subjects, it’s exactly the same Cabernet Sauvignon with a dramatically different price tag.

Specifically, the researchers found that with the higher priced wines, more blood and oxygen is sent to a part of the brain called the medial orbitofrontal cortex, whose activity reflects pleasure. Brain scanning using a method called functional magnetic resonance imaging (FMRI) showed evidence for the researchers’ hypothesis that “changes in the price of a product can influence neural computations associated with experienced pleasantness,” they said.

The study, by Hilke Plassmann, John O’Doherty, Baba Shiv, and Antonio Rangel, was published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

This chart shows that people ranked taste of a $45 wine higher than the same wine priced at $5, and the same for a different wine marked $90 and $10. (Credit: CalTech, Stanford)

The research, along with other studies the authors allude to, are putting a serious dent in economists’ notions that experienced pleasantness of a product is based on its intrinsic qualities.

“Contrary to the basic assumptions of economics, several studies have provided behavioral evidence that marketing actions can successfully affect experienced pleasantness by manipulating nonintrinsic attributes of goods. For example, knowledge of a beer’s ingredients and brand can affect reported taste quality, and the reported enjoyment of a film is influenced by expectations about its quality,” the researchers said. “Even more intriguingly, changing the price at which an energy drink is purchased can influence the ability to solve puzzles.”

Stephen Shankland writes about a wide range of technology and products, but has a particular focus on browsers and digital photography. He joined CNET News in 1998 and since then also has covered Google, Yahoo, servers, supercomputing, Linux and open-source software, and science.

My affair with Four Square took me by surprise. I’d heard about him. Heck, my friends had all dated him, so he couldn’t be that bad. But did I really want to jump on the bandwagon and be another notch in his interface? Did I want my friends and future children to know every detail of what Four Square and I had done together? That we stayed out a little too late on a ‘school night’ last Tuesday. Or that I really don’t ever cook dinner at home. And what happens when Mom and Dad find out I’m dating Four Square and lecture me about using protection and protecting my assets. Geez…the list goes on.

A glass of wine later and my inhibitions at bay, I flirted my way into his path and told him my name. And oh, the places we went. Our romance was a whirl wind. I couldn’t keep my hands off of him. And there wasn’t a friend (or stranger for that matter) that I met that I couldn’t help showing my new boy toy off to. The more time I spent with him, the better the gifts. He even made me feel like a queen and everyone around me knew it.

So what happened? Why are we on a break? Because there’s something to be said for showing a little leg and keeping it at that. I want a little mystery in my life. It helps keep the romance alive. My life was just too much of an open book with him and I jumped in too quickly. That and he shared TMI about what he’d done with my friends.

So although I haven’t ruled out drunk dialing him late one night, I’m definitely still on the lookout for someone a little more my type.

Shirley Sherrod.  Talk about a ‘teaching moment!!’  Students of media, communications, political science, race relations, business, human behavior, and more should and will be studying the case of Shirley Sherrod for years to come.  Can you imagine a more vivid snapshot of the dynamics of our time?

When it comes to quoting someone out of context (and the consequences of doing so), this one takes the cake.  When ‘fair and balanced’ Fox chose not to read past the beginning of Ms. Sherrod’s speech, it set off a domino effect of firestorms across the media, to NAACP, and even up to the White House. Et tu Brute!  Finally, CNN – often written off as sissies for trying to stay in the middle – took the time to read the entire speech and lo and behold discovered not only is this woman not a racist, she has acted with extraordinary compassion toward her fellow man, regardless of race. 

We have long since moved away from a time when people got things as right as they could before they took them to market….be it a product or a news story.  We live in a time of continuous improvement.  So, if the iPhone 4 isn’t quite right (and it’s not because you don’t know how to hold it), what the heck, they just re-engineer it, tell you they might give you a free rubber protector (if the store has any in stock), and blithely go along their merry way.  We consumers have become lab rats, testing products rather than getting products with the kinks already worked out.  It’s all part of the rush to market.

Same with news.  If the story isn’t right, no matter.  We’ll catch that in the next cycle.  Key is to get it up first.

Oh really?  Remember the networks declaring Gore won the presidency?  And what about Ms. Sherrod?

The rush to be first so egregiously misrepresented her words and her life that it may be time for the media to consider how  important being first really is.  It’s one thing to run a phony story about a celebrity’s diet or botox or supposed flings in a supermarket tabloid.  But the consequences of the Shirley Sherrod debacle deserve our close scrutiny.

So maybe we need to ask ourselves not if the product, ad, or story is absolutely perfect. Those days are for sure gone.  But what about, are we confident that it works, lives up to what we’ve said about it, and – in the case of a story – is fair and accurate?

Social media = love?

Fast Company’s July/August issue features a fascinating (albeit unproven with a sample of one) “study” on the effects of social media interaction on oxytocin levels, conducted with Paul J. Zak, a professor at Claremont Graduate University focused on neuroeconomics and Adam L. Penenberg, author of Viral Loop: From Facebook to Twitter, How Today’s Smartest Businesses Grow themselves.

Basically, similarly to being exposed to empathy-spurring images or interacting with a dog, friends or family members in a positive way, social media interaction, even often with half-strangers (i.e. engaging on Twitter, having a Facebook chat or sharing tips with Foursquare compatriots) may produce the same increases in oxytocin, considered the “human stimulant of empathy, generosity, trust.”

Imagine the implications, even beyond social media networks – brands might actually look for an emotional connection, wanting a conversation with their consumers, instead of continually pushing out their corporate message.

Interested to hear more, Dr. Love.

http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/147/doctor-love.html?page=0,3