“Language is inseparable from imagery” argues David McNeill (quoting from Antonio Damasio) in his revealing book on the relationship between gesture and language. Moreover, gestures actually help us to think and to speak and to articulate our feelings and thinking. Read more »
A recent article in Fast Company (link here) discusses an experiment in which people were asked to draw the Apple logo from memory. Their efforts were generally pretty poor (you can see examples in the article), with a few notable exceptions. The authors conclude that maybe this means that Apple don’t need to spend so much money on advertising and placing their logo. Read more »
“We expect small things to be lighter than big things, to get smaller as they move away from us, and to grow larger as they get nearer … Though seeing and hearing and touch seem simple and direct, they are not. They are fallible inferences based on knowledge and assumptions which may or may not be appropriate to the situation. Listen to a tape recording of an audience clapping. In the kitchen, it sounds like bacon frying. In the garden, it sounds like rain.” – Richard Gregory
Marketing and branding are all about creating instant meanings, and there is a lot to be learnt from how placebos work. This is not to argue that marketing is about ‘happy pills’, but rather that expectations matter and marketers need to think carefully about how expectations are created and linked to the things that people value.
The title of the first chapter of Brainwashed, ”Losing Our Minds in the Age of Brain Science”, sums up the main thread of this readable new book. Brain science is a powerful new tool to help us understand our mind, but its potential has blinded us to its (current) limitations, especially when the world is full of snake oil salespeople, determined to sell us the lie that it can answer any question and find the mythical “buy button” in the brain. The reality is that it cannot, at least for now and arguably ever. Read more »
In Seducing the Subconscious, Robert Heath argues that existing models of how advertising works are misguided, mistaken and misleading, especially about the role that attention, liking and persuasion play in influencing customer behaviour. Seducing the Subconscious draws on many well known examples of advertising as well as the work of Robert Zajonc, Herb Krugman, Antonio Damasio, Joseph LeDoux and others. Read more »
“The easiest thing of all is to deceive one’s self, for what a man wishes he generally believes to be true.” - Demosthenes
“Nature never deceives us; it is we who deceive ourselves.” - Jean Jacques Rousseau
‘I would never have missed something like that!’
How many times have we all missed something important (hopefully with no serious consequences)? Too often I hear, ‘Did you see what just happened?’ when I am unaware that anything interesting happened at all! The Invisible Gorilla explains my inattentional blindness as we have written about before, and also explains five other ways in which we all deceive ourselves, with illusions of attention, memory, knowledge, cause and potential. Read more »
“All right, brain. I don’t like you ad you don’t like me - so let’s just do this and I’ll get back to killing you with beer.” - Homer Simpson Read more »
“No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as any manner of thy friends or of thine own were; any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.” - John Donne
