Introduction to Psychology: Consciousness, Memories & Suggestibility

Yesterday I was talking to some family members about Hostess. It occurred to me that I haven't seen any commercials from the baked goods company for several years. Then it occurred to me that the last ad I remember was the campaign centered around the catch phrase, "Hey, where's the cream filling?"

There are two interesting things about this realization: 1) That Hostess doesn't have to spend a lot of money on traditional marketing because their snacks have become such a large part of American culture, and 2) The slogan, "Hey, where's the cream filling?" was first used in 1996.

At the age of 5, I perceived the message from Hostess, I encoded the message, and then I stored the message, and I remember the message nearly 17 years later during a conversation with family members. That's good marketing, Hostess. Good marketing, indeed.

When it comes to marketing, we want to ensure that the content, the ads, and the campaigns we generate are memorable. Creating memorable campaigns can result in creating new accounts. It's one thing to want to create something memorable, but it's another thing to understand how things are remembered. Get ready for a little Psych 101, fellow marketers.

Intro to Psychology: Consciousness
The readings tell us that consciousness is a personal experience of the world and one's own mind. We often confuse consciousness with simply existing. For instance, we see someone talking and walking and assume the are conscious, but we have no way of knowing if they are actually experiencing the things we see them doing. Instead of thinking of  consciousness as existing, think of it in terms of experiencing. Consciousness is a private experience of your own thoughts and the world around you. No one else can know exactly how you are experiencing something.

The overall concept of consciousness brings up two very significant problems. First is what the book refers to as Problems of Other Minds. This means that we have a hard tome perceiving the consciousness of others. As an example: Jan and Bob both taste a sour candy for the first time. Jan tastes the candy, feels it tingle her tongue, her jaw tightens, she thinks, "Wow! That's really sour," and she makes a face. She sees Bob make the same face, but she cannot know if he had the same experience as she did. Even if he says so, there is no way to ensure that they both tasted the sour in the same way. One thing the book stated that I found very insightful was this, "You are the only thing in the universe you will ever truly know what it's like to be."

The second problem is that of Mind & Body. It is hard for us to study how the mind is related to the brain and body. We do know that studies have show the brain seems to precede activities of the conscious mind, but we don't know if our consciousness is the way it is because of our brains or if there is some degree of separation between the physical make up of our brain matter and the psychological make up of our minds.

As a marketer, I can make assumptions all day about my target demographic, but on the most fundamental levels of human experience, I will never know exactly how they will experience my message.

Intro to Psychology: Memory

There are three steps to memory: encoding, storage, and retrieval. Encoding is where we transform what we perceive into a piece of information. Storage is the process of maintaining that information over time. Retrieval is bringing to mind that information that has been previously encoded and stored.  The reading also teaches that memories aren't just sets of current information, they are actually a combination of new information with previously stored information.

Earlier I mentioned recalling a Twinkies commercial that I first saw at the age of five. Somehow when I saw that commercial, I encoding the information that Twinkies have cream filling. I stored that memory and retrieved it enough times (this process of retrieving the information multiple times is also called rehearsal) that I was able to store the Hostess catch phrase as a long-term memory. This memory, while unattended for several years, still existed in my long-term memory, and once called upon it was again rehearsed and remembered.

Relating this to marketing, even further, brings to mind a couple of questions. How do we make a commercial or slogan so memorable that people rehearse it long after they have seen the commercial? Also, what are the most important elements of our campaign that we want people to encode, store and be able to retrieve?

Intro to Psychology: Suggestibility
Have you ever thought about what your earliest memory is? Have you been able to narrow it down to a specific moment in time? How old were you? I've always had a hard time with this exercise because I have a hard time separating actual memories from suggested memories. Suggestibility is our tendency to incorporate misleading information from external sources into personal recollections. As an example, I have seen a picture of our family during a party and seem to remember my aunt trying to get everyone together to take the picture, but I also remember my aunt showing me the picture and telling me about it. So do I remember the actual event of the picture being taken, or have I been told about the event and seen the picture enough to put that event together as a memory? It's hard to say, but suggestibility can play a big role in everything from family memories, to childhood traumas, to hypnosis, even to how we view certain products.

Let's say for instance you are doing a focus group on a new product and you are asking people's opinions on Miracle Whip versus Mayo. Showing the group a picture of a mom making a sandwich for a child using Miracle Whip, then asking them whether or not they remember which condiment their mothers used on their sandwiches as children may suggest a certain brand to them one way or the other.

Does suggestibility have it's place in marketing? Certainly. If there's a way that we can get our products or services integrated with certain long term memories of our clients, they are more likely to recall our brand when they are looking for our particular services.

We all want our marketing efforts to be memorable. The trick is making them so memorable that 17 years down the road when our clients are in the store looking for some baked snacks they will recall, "Hey, where's the cream filling?"