A trick of the mind: how to prime consumers

Coke tastes better once we know what brand it is and expensive wine tastes better than the cheap stuff – or at least that’s what we think. William Hanmer-Lloyd explores how brands can prime consumers to their advantage…

Recently staff at Boujis have been caught refilling Dom Perignon bottles with cheap Prosecco, and Grey Goose vodka with Imperial vodka (the cheap vodka associated with most of my best and worst university memories).

According to The Telegraph this activity had been encouraged as a cost cutting technique. What is interesting here is not the un-shocking revelation that a West London club attended by the wealthy is tricking them into overpaying for below par products, but that the practice apparently occurred with no one noticing.

This may be partly because people were drunk and partly because alcohol tastes more similar than we like to believe, but also because they were primed to enjoy their bottle of expensive champagne by the brand. Priming was more important to their experience than the actual quality of the drink.

Priming occurs when an earlier stimulus influences response to a later stimulus, and it exists in many forms. When a person reads a list of words including the word table, and is later asked to complete a word starting with tab, the likelihood that the respondent answers table is higher than for non-primed people.

But as well as changing what we say, it can also alter how we actually experience a product or service.

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Coke tastes better once we know what brand it is. Wine becomes more enjoyable in proportion to its perceived price. One explanation for this comes from neuroscience.

For instance, neuroeconomists at Caltech have used fMRI tests to show that the orbitofrontal cortex (which is generally considered to represent reward and emotion in decision making) becomes more excited the greater the price of wine.

Other research shows that the Amygdala (which secures pleasure, but avoids pain, and encodes our emotional memory of an experience) is stimulated or not, depending upon whether it anticipates excitement.

This means our expectation of enjoyment is self-fulfilling: a brand that has primed consumers to expect enjoyment will be experienced, and remembered, as more pleasurable.

The strength of a brand therefore is partially determined by its ability to prime consumers (to activate the amygdala or orbitofrontal cortex). Advertising can be specifically tasked to do this, with the messaging focusing on the enjoyment that will be experienced when consuming a brand.

But the impact of priming is not just limited to our enjoyment of a product; it can influence whether the product or service is effective as well.

For example, pain killers become more effective when they are more expensive or branded. In blind tests people actually felt a greater reduction in pain when they were told that pain killers were more expensive or branded versions.

This raises interesting questions about the recent Nurofen ad banned by the ASA for implying that it targeted back pain. The only thing that would make the medication target back pain better than other medications is the consumer’s belief that it did. The ad therefore could be seen as a self-fulfilling prophesy.

Other research into energy and soft drinks, carried out by Dan Ariely, found that soft drinks meant to improve our mental sharpness actually increase our smartness more the greater they go up in price (as captured by participant’s performance in tests after consuming the energy drink).

The explanation for this is that human experience and performance is malleable to placebos, what we are told, and how well we expect to do.

For example women do worse in the same math tests, compared to men, if they are told that women generally perform less well than men in maths tests. However, if they are told that women generally perform as well as men in the maths test, then they gain a score that is average to men.

Understanding this priming impact is important for advertising and understanding the purpose of our messaging. Rather than just influencing us to purchase, advertising can also increase the likelihood of repeat purchase; priming consumers can make them enjoy a product more, or get greater utility from it, making them want to buy it again – delivering long term sales for the brand.

As such priming should be increasingly considered when developing the purpose of a campaign, and explaining the measurement of its success.

William Hanmer-Lloyd is a behavioural planner at Total Media

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