Hi, my name's Gavan Fitzsimons. I'm the R.
David Thomas professor of marketing and psychology here at Duke University.
today I'm going to be taking a little time to tell you about some of the work
we do in our lab. focused around an issue that we like to
call the unconscious consumer. And usually when I say the term
unconscious consumer in one sort of, package like that, it starts to make
people a little bit nervous. And I say, wait a second, I'm not
unconscious when I'm in consumption mode. When I'm walking through a store, I know
exactly what I'm doing. But I'm choosing between two autombiles,
I know exactly what I'm doing. When I'm deciding whether to have that
snack or take a pass, I know exactly what I'm doing.
In fact, what I'm going to do today is try to convince you that far more is
occurring outside your conscious awareness than you'd like to believe when
you're in consumption mode. I thought I'd start out, I had sort of
three little ideals that I'd like tell you about, but I though I'd start out
with a personal anecdote. This is going back a little ways, to when
I was a graduate student myself. I was I was living New York at the time,
I was a graduate student at Columbia. And, it was a January night, it was maybe
40ish degrees Fahrenheit, 2 or 3 Celsius and it was kind of drizzly and rainy out.
I realized had I ran out of Diet Coke. This was quite a tragedy for me.
I love Diet Coke. I needed to fill my fridge with Diet Coke
immediately. So I was in short, soccer shorts, and a
t-shirt and flip-flops. Fortunately in living in Manhattan theirs
a deli sort of underneath every building. To get to my deli, I had to go out the
front door, around the corner into the deli.
And so out I went, money in hand, ready to purchase my 2 liter diet coke.
Walked into the deli, nodded hi to the guy behind the counter, went over to the
spot where the 2 liter Diet Coke was. But there was no 2 liter Diet Coke.
I was taken aback. Empty spot where the 2 liter Diet Coke
always was. So I leaned back to the fella behind the
counter. I said, hey, can you grab a couple of, 2
liter Diet Cokes? And he said, I can still hear his accent
and everything in my mind. He said, I'm sorry.
We're all out of 2 liter Diet Coke. Nothing could have been more horrible to
me at the time. I love my Diet Coke and I love my 2 liter
Diet Coke. He followed up with an interesting
statement, which was, I'll give you 2 1-liter bottles of diet coke for the same
price as a 2 liter bottle. I paused for a moment.
I thought about it and I realized I didn't want 2 1-liter bottles of diet
coke, I wanted a 2 liter bottle of diet coke.
So I left in a little bit of a huff, walked out of the deli, walked up the
street. Now, I think I mentioned, it was quite
chilly and raining. I get up the block, go into the next
deli. In New York there's a deli every block.
went into the next deli, looked, no 2 liter diet coke.
Went out another block, another deli, no 2 liter diet coke.
At this point, I had a decision. Do I give up?
Do I walk the whole way across the avenue which is maybe a quarter mile, a half a
kilometer, something like that, to a dip, to another deli.
I did so, I got there, walked in. They had 2 liter Diet Coke, fantastic.
I bought 6 bottles of it. Now I had 6 bottles, 3 in each hand.
Walking back across Columbia campus, soaking wet, freezing cold.
Arms pulling out of their shoulder sockets and I realized, something bizarre
has just happened to me. What was it?
I was experiencing something that folks have called psychological reactance, and
reactance is the, basically the idea that, when something's restricted, when
freedom of my choice is restricted, I'm going to fight really hard to get it
back. In that particular instance, it was the
first personal anecdotal experience I'd ever had of a psychological process
overpowering me, taking over my actions, leading to some, somewhat [LAUGH] strange
consumption behavior all outside of my conscious awareness and control.
And, that sort of triggered this notion of for me, of understanding forces that
occur outside our conscious control, that might be shaping our consumption
behavior. one of the interesting follow ups from
that, sort of basic observation and line of work we did, was realizing that
oftentimes the trigger for a restriction of a freedom aren't nearly as obvious to
you as the lack of a 2 liter Diet Coke in it's spot in the store.
So for example in a social domain we found that, and this is work with Amy
Dalton and Tanya Chartrand. Tanya, who happens to be my wife once
observed that I often don't do the things that she would like me to do and I
expressed surprise at that observation on her part, and we ended up doing some
research on the topic. And what we found was that there are
certain people who chronically experience this notion of resistance to
restrictions, on an automatic basis. And I actually, what we found was that
myself and people like me that don't like to have their freedoms restricted will
actually restrict or will react against what their significant others would like
them to do. Your mom, your dad, your loved one, they
would like you to say, work hard, for example.
Alright, all it takes for some folks is to hear in the way background, the little
background back there, the name of their significant other.
The name of their mom or dad. Instead of actually doing the things that
their mom or dad or loved one would like you to do, like work hard.
You actually do the exact opposite. Completely outside conscious awareness
sometimes. It's such a strong effect that we were
able to subliminally prime, and subliminal is Latin for sub, meaning
below and liminal meaning threshold so below threshold.
Subliminally prime people with the name of their loved one.
So much so that, or below their level of awareness so we prime them below their
level of awareness. So in a way that their sort of optical
system and their brain can recognize the name of the significant other, but at a
conscious level they are not able to do so.
so we activate in their minds the name of this significant other and then we put
them in this situation where they could work hard or relax.
For many people that experience psychological reactants on a regular
bases. They actually backlashed against what
their loved one wanted them to do, and did the exact opposite.
Back into a consumption setting, we take that same kind of notion.
So now, some of us are, are sort of, bristle at restrictions, don't like
people to tell us what to do. Some of you that are, are watching this
today might think to yourself, well I can sort of identify with that, I've about
had it with people telling me what to do in certain spaces.
So, some of you might have heard recently that you should, for example, eat
healthy. And I bet if you've heard eat healthy
once you've heard eat healthy a thousand times.
Or exercise. You should exercise more, right.
And again if you've heard it once, you've heard it a thousand times.
As you repeatedly get exposed to those message in your life, for some of us, we
build up a resistance to that message. And in fact, we want to do just the
opposite of that. And that was sort of the underlying
premise of some work that Peggie Lou, who's a PhD student with with me, started
doing, looking at what we call indirect priming, or indirect persuasion.
And so the idea here is that by sometimes, we're better to indirectly try
to reach out to a person to a consumer and try to pursued them to do something
that might be in their best interest by not triggering this backlash reaction.
And so for example if we want you to eat healthy we have found that it's actually
better to subliminally prime you with the message exercise, rather, then
subliminally with the message eat healthy.
If we subliminally prime you with the message eat healthy, some people will
actually not eat healthy, they'll backlash against it.
And, and so we find that these indirect means to try to persuade folks, can
sometimes be more effective then a direct in your face kind of message.
So, when your thinking about trying to eat healthy, when your thinking about
trying to exercise in your own sort of lives think about what are the triggers
in this environment that might lead me to outside of my conscience awareness
actually back lash against this message and do something that in the long run
could actually quite be harmful to me. so those are little examples of this idea
that we can backlash against situational, environmental cues, in consumption ways,
that will actually lead to outcomes that can be bad for us.
obviously, if you sort of think classically from a, a traditional
decision making, a traditional economic perspective, we would never do something
that would be bad for us. And I think most folks, if you asked
them, would not want to engage in these negative behaviors.
And yet, we find ourselves doing so. And I'll return and, and, and visit to
this general idea that sometimes things occur outside conscious awareness that
might not be so good for us in, in a bit. the second line of work that I thought
would be fun to, to talk about today is some work that we've done looking at,
what we call, brief brand exposures. And the ideal here is that we're exposed,
the average consumer is exposed to many many brands in a paticular, in one day.
So for example, most western societies, we're exposed to somewhere between 5 and
10,000 brands in a day. And obviously that's far too many brands
for us to consciously process in a meaningful way.
so what happens? Does this simply, do they simply pass in
front of us, a logo on someones shirt a thing on a co-, on a coffee cup.
or are they affecting us in some way, are they simply, you know, background noise
or are they affecting us in some way? And one of the, the studies that we did
to try to to sort of understand this this question, or to answer this question, was
a study with with Tanya Chartrand and [UNKNOWN] Fitzsimmons where we looked at
at different brief brand exposures. And the two that we'll tell you about
today is Apple and IBM. So, we choose two brands that are in the
product category, we then subliminally exposed people to one of each of these
two brands. And, we then looked to see if it had an
effect on peoples behavior in some meaningful way.
the domain that we looked at to test whether it was impacting behavior, was in
the, the sort of field of creativity. And the ideal was, that the Apple brand
logo had very strong associations with creativity.
Both Apple and IBM were equally liked, they were equally well-known, etcetera.
but Apple had a really strong set of associations with creativity.
So we exposed people to the brand logos outside their conscious awareness, and we
put them in a setting where they could be creative, where they could demonstrate
creativity. And what we found, was that people
exposed to the Apple brand logo were dramatically more creative than people
exposed to the Apple or to the IBM logo. Apple exposed people way more creative,
IBM exposed people slightly less creative than a neutral of situation in the
middle. So here's a, there's a little example of
the simple incidental brand exposures that occur on a daily basis, thousands of
them. And each of them is impacting us
potentially in some way changing our behavior.
Now, if I asked you do you think you be got more creative because you saw that
Apple logo. I'm certain that everybody watching today
would say, no that seems crazy. That really seems silly.
How can that possibly be the case? and yet, we have very clear empirical
evidence that these brief exposures change both the psychological process, as
well as actual behavior. So, I've talked to you today about
backlash, and how backlash can occur outside our conscious awareness,
sometimes leading to harmful effects. I've talked to you about brief brand
exposures, IBM and Apple, that can lead to positive effects.
When should be we terrified that we're being influenced outside our conscious
awareness, left, right, and center. I think it's easy to become paranoid that
that the world around you is trying to change your behavior.
The truth of the matter is the world around you is trying to change your
behavior. Some of it is very systematic, some of it
is not. I like to tell people when they think
about unconscious consumption, that it's typically not the case that, for example,
subliminal exposure to any kind of brand logo will make you choose that brand
logo. So for example I'm a Diet Coke drinker, I
love my Diet Coke. You could expose me to Diet Pepsi a
million times in a row. I'll never choose Diet Pepsi over Diet
Coke. Alright, however, with exposure to Diet
Coke, whether it be through an ad, through watching someone walk by on a
street with a Diet Coke lead me to want to consume a little more Diet Coke?
The answer is proablay yes. So if you're trying to defend against
that we've got to be very vigilant, alright.
The reality is though that our ability to defend against the non-conscience
influence in our environments is pretty limited.
So I like to say and I like to, I'd like to leave you with this thought that it's
probably worthwhile investing in being strategic about the brands and the
consumption objects you surround yourself with.
So, for example, if you're a swimmer, and you'd like to really swim a faster race,
you'd like to cut a couple of tenths off your 50 meter swim.
Maybe you should wear the same parka, on the warm up deck, that Michael Phelps
wore. Now, the first day that you buy that
parka, and you put it on, you're going to feel silly.
You're going to realize that you've got Michael Phelps' parka on, and clearly
that can't make you a faster swimmer. The second day, you might still feel a
little of that. 3 weeks out, you're not going to be
consciously thinking about the fact that you're strategically donning Michael
Phelps' warm-up jacket. But that association between the jacket
and Michael Phelps and how fast a swimmer he is, is going to be activated at some
level below your conscious threshold in your mind.
You hit the pool, you swim, you cut the 2 10ths off.
Same thing for creativity, for, for for intelligence, for just about any
desirable aspirational goal you might have.
Surrounding yourself with consumer goods that are strongly associated with that
and activate that idea in your mind can lead you to to basically be a, a
successful strategic user of brands, products, etc.
Rather than letting you have brands, products, etc, change you are, who you
are and, and, and the way that you behave in a sort of random way.
So think strategically, surround yourself with objects, with the brands, with the
products that are going to make you a strategic unconscious consumer.