It’s a new week…and a new topic to blog about. I found myself searching for a topic that made sense to my ‘theme’ and more importantly, was related to consumer psychology. So I struggled. “Why, oh why, did I decide to talk about gender,” I moaned for the umpteenth time. Then I realized something I knew, anyway. Consumer psychology is all around us. It’s our daily experience. As long as you buy a packet of chewing gum, go shopping for nail polish, watch a commercial and decide never to buy anything from ‘those people’ again or fall in love with a new product you saw on TV and decide to try it out.  As I sat through my last Consumer Psych class, I realized that issues we learned about in lofty-sounding psychology theories, answer questions we deliberate about everyday as consumers. Ok, hardly an epiphany, but for me, having never studied psychology, it was quite illuminating to be able to relate my real time experience to psychological theory I was meant to study. For instance I’ve always wondered why it was necessary to have a beautiful, sometimes barely clad woman, in an advertisement for a totally unrelated product. Feminists are usually up in arms about the sexual objectification of women that is prevalent in popular media.

We studied about the Lynx Dry advert campaign, one of which had the lovely Lucy Pinder , bending over to remove a roast from the oven, lingerie clad bottom in the air (you could almost see the wiggle!) It’s a bit of a stretch, linking that image of a semi-nude woman to a men’s antiperspirant. What’s the connection? How about beer ads? Or, car commercials? These usually feature a bikini clad beauty draped over the car, who usually has no connection in shape, form or concept with that product. Or a tough beautiful biker chick on a Harley?

However, outraged feminist complaints aside, in marketing, this is key in influencing consumer behavior: associating a brand with a positive image, will, over time, elicit positive emotions. This learning, acquired through repeated experience, is Classical Conditioning. Ivan Pavlov’s experiment where a dog is conditioned to relate the ringing of a bell and food, causing it to salivate, and through continuous learning, subsequently salivating upon the sound of the bell without the food, is the most well-known experiment and example of classical conditioning. (Olson and Hergenhahn, 2009).

According to Schiffman and Kanuk, “a great deal of advertising fits the model of conditioned learning.” (1983, p.176) While we talk of gender stereotype and the objectification of women, the truth is that these images are what sell products. Many brands utilize this approach to create the learned behavior that would enable a development of certain association with their products, thereby increasing sales and revenue. It works. The brand remains popular sometimes despite sanctions or withdrawal of the more controversial commercials. Sex sells. And sometimes, notoriety.

All we can do is hope for a more responsible use of this approach. In the past, the line between what is acceptable and what is downright reprehensible has been egregiously crossed.  Calvin Kline, for instance, has come under fire several times for its ads which push the envelope quite a bit. From ads bordering on child porn, to ads that seemingly glorify rape. It is hard to find anything positive about these associations.

References:

Olson,M. and Hergenhahn, B.(2009). Introduction to the Theories of Learning (8^th ed.) Saddle River NJ: Pearson/Prentice Hall

Schiffman, L. and Kanuk, L.(1983). Consumer Behavior, 2^nd ed. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall