Leif Stromnes, managing director of strategy and growth at DDB Australia, pulls out a psychology experiment to illustrate how brands can win consumers over with emotions rather than reason, to prove the age-old adage “show, don’t tell” to be as relevant for brands today as ever.
In New York City in 2002, two psychologists from Columbia University organised a speed dating event with a difference. In addition to the usual six-minute “forced exposure” where the guys and girls got to meet and chat to test for mutual connection, they were also asked to fill out a questionnaire before the event on what they were looking for in a romantic partner.
The questionnaire forced the respondents to think rationally about the attributes they thought would influence their decision-making.
The categories were attractiveness, shared interests, funny/sense of humour, sincerity, and intelligence and ambition.
Unsurprisingly (for the psychologists), most people’s choices after the six minute face to face contact bore little resemblance to the long list they had compiled before the get-together. Where someone might have written intelligent and sincere as desirable traits, the person they were most attracted to might have been silly and playful. Their rational “before thinking” had often been completely usurped by their emotional “in the moment” feelings.
But the most interesting bit of the experiment was still to come. In an ingenious twist, the psychologists forced the couples who had mutually “matched” to review their chosen questionnaire criteria the day after the event, one month later, and then six months after this.
Rather than being benign, this exercise proved to be negative and confusing. Whilst they might have been comfortable and satisfied with their chosen partners, when they were forced to review the additional information they became unsure, with some even questioning whether their decision on that exciting evening of hot emotion was a good one.
Humans are experts at what psychologists Nalini Ambady and Robert Rosenthal call “thin slicing”; the ability to make judgements on thin slices or narrow windows of experience.
But when we force more information onto people as in the speed dating example, it often has no added benefit, and might even make us worse decision-makers by confusing us and clouding what had been a straightforward and emotionally pleasing decision.
The psychologist Jonathan Schooler pioneered research on a similar phenomenon through an experiment with strawberry jam, naming it “verbal overshadowing.”
Consumer Reports magazine put together a panel of food experts and asked them to rank 44 different brands of strawberry jam on very specific measures of texture and taste. Schooler then asked a group of college students to rate the same jams based purely on their “thin slice” reactions. The students’ rankings were remarkably close to the experts. It turns out most of us instinctively know what a good jam tastes like, even if we’re not jam experts.
But as in the speed dating experiment, when a separate set of students were asked to enumerate their ranking using rational explanations and logic for their choices, their list was completely different from the jam experts. The correlation was next to zero, whereas amongst the first group of thin-slice students, the correlation was extremely high. By making people think about jam, Schooler had turned them into jam idiots.
Brands often make the same mistake. In our desire to be as persuasive as possible, our instinct is to provide our customers with all the information we think they need, and maybe a bit more. But as we have seen, a good decision is an emotionally easy one, and additional words often lead to verbal overshadowing, destroying our ability to thin-slice the decision that is right for us.
Decision-making, it turns out, may be a bit like love. The more you analyse it, the faster it disappears.
