THE CHAMPAGNE GLASS EFFECT :

THE CHAMPAGNE GLASS DISTRIBUTION OF WEALTH.

What Works

This graphic works as well as it does in part because it evokes the too-delicate feel of a champagne glass in hand. All that wealth resting on so little. The shape does what a data table alone cannot – it subtly suggests that the wealthy are resting on the poor and that the balance is quite precarious.

SOURCE : THE SOCIETY PAGES / LAURA NOREN

The new age of Sensory Marketing : Dunkin Donuts

If seeing can inspire you to buy a product, research says that other senses can equally affect your desire to 'aspire' to a product.
That is smelling, or touching too. Enter, Sensory Marketing.

The global doughnut American company Dunkin Donuts had pointed out an escalating problem that soon needed to be addressed. DD is also a coffee-house chain that offers coffee, but blame it on the name or their distracting delicious donuts, the consumers apparently did not associate the local DD store with their morning or evening dose of coffee. Of course, with mainstream coffee brands (read: Starbucks) focusing only on the multitude varieties of coffee offered, this seemed to turn a huge roadblock for the coffee sales of this doughnut giant. It soon charted out a plan to compete with the likes of Starbucks and attract the coffee lovers.

"When you listen to a jingle of the Dunkin Donuts talking about their coffee, paired along with the aroma of coffee, you subconsciously start pairing the idea of coffee with Dunkin Donuts. This is Classical Conditioning."

To increase your association with a product,  sensory organs play a huge role and Dunkin Donuts recognised that. In 2012, the Seoul Dunkin Office in South Korea got in touch with the advertising agency Cheil Worldwide. Together, they devised an aroma machine that releases the 'coffee-aroma' every time the donut jingle was played on the radio - 'Flavor Radio'. The concept of brain association is not new in psychology - Russian Physiologist Pavlov introduced Classical Conditioning - a process of behaviour modification in which an innate response to a potent biological stimulus becomes expressed in response to a previously neutral stimulus - achieved by repeated pairings of the neutral stimulus and the potent biological stimulus that elicits the desired response. Hence, when you listen to a jingle of the Dunkin Donuts talking about their coffee, paired along with the aroma of coffee, you subconsciously start pairing the idea of coffee with Dunkin Donuts. Thus, you are inducing association in the exposed customer's brain between coffee and DD. Pure genius.

"It worked. The Sales of Dunkin Donuts increased by 29% while visitors increased by about 16%."

Apparently, this much calculated effort worked. The visitors to the DD shops located near bus stops (the ads were conducted in buses that had a drop-off around a nearby DD shop) increased by about 16% while the sales increased by 29%. Of course, it bagged the Cannes Award for creativity in 2012 - and deservedly so - for this is one of those classic examples where behavioural research is being used to master consumer psychology. Of course an association like that will only last if the coffee actually tastes good. So those accusing the ad of consumer manipulation can be rest assured that you can't really force a coffee lover to consume a coffee they don't like. The product at the end of the day has its own consumer affinity tests to clear. But getting consumers to your door - that is what turns challenging for most - DD has surely revolutionised this using the sensory marketing in its own novel way.

Advertising agency: Cheil Worldwide, Seoul, South Korea.
What; Interactive Radio Advertisement Releasing a Coffee Aroma via Voice Recognition Technology
Published: January 2012

SOURCE: THE CURIOUS BLOGGER 

AMBIVALENT SEXISM STUDY

Sexism often comes with a smile, study finds

Benevolent sexism makes men more smiley when they interact with women, and that's bad news. Men who put women on a pedestal may be the wolves in sheep clothing hindering gender equality.

A new study examining the nonverbal cues thrown out during interactions between men and women finds that men who have high ratings of "benevolent sexism" — attitudes towards women that are well-intentioned but perpetuate inequality — finds that smiling and other positive cues increase when this kind of sexism is prevalent.

The study, published Monday in the journal Sex Roles, is a small one: Researchers examined the interactions between 27 pairs of American college students.

"Basically, the argument is that these two properties — hostile sexism and benevolent sexism — work together to maintain inequality," said lead author Jin Goh, a graduate student at Northeastern University. Most people think of sexist men as being dominant aggressors who believe that women should be put down in society. But other men believe that women should be treated with kindness and love, but still don't see them as being capable of achieving the same things as men.

"It's a very paternalistic, protective view of women, and it seems kind of appealing as a sort of chivalry," Goh said, "But it does contribute to inequality, because these men don't expect women to achieve high goals."

"Men actually act friendlier and smile a lot if they have more benevolent sexism," Goh explained. He measured their ideology using a test called the Ambivalent Sexism Index. It had men rate their agreement with statements like "women are too easily offended" (an example of hostile sexism) and "a good woman should be set on a pedestal by her man" (an example of benevolent sexism). Statements that suggested equality, like "women shouldn't necessarily be rescued before men during a disaster" gave negative scores.

"Sexism can appear very friendly and very welcoming, so in the paper we said that sexism can act like a wolf in sheep’s clothing," Goh said.  "We add that sexism can consciously or unconsciously cloak itself in friendliness, so in a way it’s more insidious and treacherous than hostile sexism."

The danger, Goh said, is that interactions are more pleasant when these kind of nonverbal cues are in play. While hostile sexists are less likely to smile and make pleasantries — making them easy to spot — benevolent sexists are actually more likable at first blush than men who truly respect women.

SOURCE: THE WASHINGTON POST / SPEAKING OF SCIENCE / RACHEL FELTMAN

THE CHEERLEADER EFFECT

Cheerleader Effect: Why People Are More Beautiful in Groups

Who should I hang out with if I want to look the most attractive? And how many of said people must I acquire?

The basic idea of research published this week in the journal Psychological Science is that our asymmetries and disproportionalities tend to "average out" amid a group of faces, and our weird little faces are perceived as slightly less weird.

Drew Walker and Edward Vul of the University of California, San Diego, did five experiments wherein subjects rated the attractiveness of people in photographs. Some people were pictured alone, and others were in groups. (Sometimes the "groups" were actually collages of people alone.)

In every case, for men and women, the people in groups got higher attractiveness ratings. Walker reasoned: "Average faces are more attractive, likely due to the averaging out of unattractive idiosyncrasies." They refer to this as the "cheerleader effect."

The cheerleader effect was first entered into Urban Dictionary in 2008, where it is defined by exemplary, hyperbolic premises: "Altogether the cheerleading team looks attractive, however on closer inspection, each person is quite ugly, another heteronormative example might be the spice girls, or the group of women who dance in a circle at the bar-usually with a pile of purses in the middle , or the sort of situation that occurs at any Canadian fraternity common room  where all together the men look hot but when checked out are actually bunk-ass."

Then from boorish observation to scientific postulate, Walker and Vul say the effect is borne of "the fact that the visual system represents objects as an ensemble, individual objects are biased toward the ensemble average, and average faces are perceived to be more attractive than faces in isolation. Together, these phenomena should cause faces in a group to appear more like the group average than when presented alone, and that group average should tend to be more attractive than the individual faces, on average."

"Having a few wingmen or wingwomen," Walker and Vul conclude—writing in the academic journal article—"may indeed be a good dating strategy, particularly if their facial features complement and average out one’s unattractive idiosyncrasies."

SOURCE: THE ATLANTIC /JAMES HABLIN

FOOD FOR THOUGHT

Pulitzer Prize winning science journalist John McQuaid in his new book "Tasty: The Art and Science of What We Eat" claims that the human mouth has only 3 types of receptors for sweetness but 23 for bitterness. Taste developed as a primitive aversion-attraction binary that helped the earliest organisms find (sweet) sustenance and avoid (bitter) poisons - jellyfish, fruit flies and even bacteria can recognise bitter compounds - which is why they are still around today.
Also, apparently, human beings seem to take pleasure in eating painfully spicy food to feed the human hunger for risk and arousal without the downside of actual bodily harm. Food for thought!

Source : Bloomberg Businessweek Middle East Feb 2015 edition.

The Eternal Family of Four

A father, a mother, a boy and a girl – all bathed in sunshine and happiness either holidaying at a resort, having a little weekend getaway at the park or trying to fit into that perfect family car. Why is this family of four perennially around us? The Curious Case Study tries to unravel the foursome.

The Great Idaho Getaway Campaign by Idaho Tourism. (2011)

An advertisement in its own right is a reflection of what the society is at that given time, and somewhere in its expression, it sneaks in a mirror of aspiration, of what it would like the society to aspire to, slowly trying to convince that the people ‘need’ that particular lifestyle or that particular product. 

A father, a mother, a boy and a girl – all bathed in sunshine and happiness either holidaying at a resort, having a little weekend getaway at the park or trying to fit into that perfect family car. The father is athletic and good-looking (most times!), the mother is fit and seems quite unlikely to be dealing with post partum weight gain, the elder kid is usually a boy and the younger sister is most times (if not always) happily playing with her little dolls. They have sold it all – from cars, to cereal, to travel destinations, to holiday packages. And of course, how can one forget insurance? The one where middle-aged man is playing with his son, and has a vision of his son’s graduation when he sees him playing with a stethoscope; or the daughter getting married when he sees his little girl arranging her doll house. The insurance policies are right there, to scare you and alert you of the possibility that you might fall short just when in need. Prepare, for the future.

The 1946 Vintage Poster for Pennyslvia Railroad Ad

What is it about this four membered gang that the brands find so convincing? 

To reiterate, the ad industry gives a fair amount of validation to what really exists in society at that point. To antagonize this ‘perfect family’ concept, a person to start with will go through various stages – From a single child, to when he has a sibling, to being a part of an assumed four membered family with his mom and dad, to going to school and college, to finding the perfect love, to being the couple that again is a target audience for many brands, to the ‘prospect’ of himself growing a family, exactly like where he came from. This ‘prospect’ attracts a lot of attention. Why is this stage projected to be so important in a person’s life?

The 2011 'Big Day' Weetabix commercial shot by BBH London.
Watch the ad here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJo9vnvrnss 

The stage of actually having a family, of having two children of your own, and envisioning a future for them, is a dream that a couple shares together. Many couples that we spoke to, liked the idea of balance – one girl and one boy – to be able to experience the joys of both kinds of childhood – to see your girl play with dolls like the mother must have , to see the boy break little cars like the father must have – both identifying the kids with their own passing childhood. Why not less than two? The sibling adds a beautiful company, they say. Why not more than two? It just may get a little too much to handle. And in today’s age, having a family is somewhere more of an economic decision than an emotional one.

Insurance companies both medical and dental vouch
ecstatically for the happy family of four - if you use their policies.

"This family of four, with two little kids, at this particular stage denotes growth, evolution and a certainty of wholesomeness – a wholesomeness that you can achieve if the homemaker takes the right decision."                                    

 

Of course this adage applies to majority, for a personal definition of a complete family may differ for every individual – for some five seems perfect. For some one kid suffices for a lifetime. It all comes down to one’s own definition of family satisfaction.

But lets speak for the majority who conclude to the magic number four – a picture of the family of four somehow depicts the reins of future in the hands of the homemakers – the Moms and Dads. It signifies the brink of aspiration, the future that you were dreaming of when you were single, of being the perfect provider for a family of your own. It signifies a promise for the future. This family of four, with two little kids, at this particular stage denotes growth, evolution and a certainty of wholesomeness – a wholesomeness that you can achieve if the homemaker takes the right decision. Enter, ad gurus.

"No two families are alike." The vintage 1952 ad for American insurance company John Hancock.

The brands love to master and glorify this single aspect of adulthood stage to remind the viewers that it all depends on what decision the viewer takes – the right ones can build the future of their little ones, give them some great memories and pictures; the wrong ones can of course make one look like the regretful old uncle that none of us want to identify with. Of course, with that mirror, the viewers may be convinced at some point to buy those travel plans, that family car, that family cereal and that family holiday – to tell their kids how amazing and thoughtful of a homemaker they are. 

One may not really remember the brand that was marketing the idea, but they certainly sold the ‘idea’ of doing it in the first place to innocent viewers wanting to emulate the ‘perfect family’ ideal. To look like that perfect family of four, bathed in sunshine and happiness, which will only happen after we use those magical happiness-inducing products.

We wonder though, will the kids remember these ‘life-changing’ decisions that we took while he was busy dirtying his little clothes in the murk? Well we can never be quite sure, but of course, we are going to try anyways.

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          Holidays for four, anyone?