Posted: 5th March, 2012. Topics:
Paul Feldwick, Consultant at Paul Feldwick Ltd, gives his view on the implications of Robert Heath’s new book, Seducing the Subconscious.
‘There are no hidden persuaders’, wrote Rosser Reeves in 1961: ‘Advertising does its work openly, in the bare and pitiless sunlight.’ It was never true, of course: even Reeves’ own commercials made frequent use of men in white coats, which we now know are powerful subconscious symbols of authority. But ever since Vance Packard’s 1957 book The Hidden Persuaders, the claim to be honest salesmen, offering nothing but transparent information, has been the ad industry’s main line of defence –– despite its serious inadequacy in describing how advertising really influences behaviour.
Given what we now know about implicit learning, the emotional roots of decision making, ‘priming’, the ‘adaptive unconscious’, biases and heuristics, and all those other findings from neuroscience and behavioural psychology that have recently become widely accessible, we can no longer pretend that Reeves’ argument holds any merit. Dr Robert Heath, who teaches at the University of Bath, has popularised the theory of ‘low attention processing’, which argues that ads make a stronger emotional and behavioural impact when we are paying less conscious attention to them. In his new book, Seducing the Subconscious, he further develops this thinking, providing a detailed and scholarly explanation of the psychological processes involved, and illustrating these with advertising examples, many based on his own long experience in ad agencies.
I ought to declare an interest: Robert is a friend of mine, I read this book in manuscript, and we had several discussions about it at that stage, so I think the job of reviewing it is best left to others. I do, however, have some thoughts about a question the book raises, one which the author treats briefly at the end but, understandably, does not resolve. If we accept that our decision making processes are to a large extent unconscious, and that our decisions are influenced by signs and signals that we are frequently unaware of, where if anywhere can we draw an ethical line between what is acceptable in advertising and what is not?
In considering this question, we should pay close attention to the power of the language we use. ‘Brainwashing’ clearly sounds quite evil, ‘manipulation’ is pretty bad too, and even ‘seduction’ is suspect (I’ll come back to that word in a moment). All these, ironically enough, are metaphors, social constructions that come with their own powerful associations – biasing our responses without us noticing how they do so, in exactly the way that advertising itself could be accused of doing.
We should also question the assumption that advertising is in some way a special case. Daniel Kahneman’s recent book, Thinking Fast and Slow, deals extensively with unconscious mental processes and cites some of the same psychological evidence as Seducing the Subconscious, but does not even mention ‘advertising’ in its index. What is true about how advertising influences us below conscious awareness is also true of packaging, of store design, of product design, and of the ways we dress, act and speak to each other every day; it pervades our lives. Timothy Wilson writes in Strangers to Ourselves that ‘the causal role of conscious thought has been vastly over-rated; instead, it is often a post-hoc explanation of responses that emanated from the adaptive unconscious’, and he even cites evidence that we make more satisfying choices when we go with our intuition rather than analysis. The fundamental principles of subconscious decision making are not specific to advertising, and were not invented by sinister scientists: this is just part of the way our brains work, and how we make choices.
One of my first ad agency mentors liked to recall his first job on a market stall, cutting the leaves off the cauliflowers to make them look more attractive. We might consider that most of advertising and branding (not only packaging and design) is simply a way of making what you have for sale look more attractive. That aesthetic appeal is something people generally find hard to put into words; they may not notice the importance it plays in their choice, and indeed they may resist any suggestion that they didn’t choose on more functional, ‘rational’ criteria. But traders soon find out from experience what makes the difference to sales, and respond accordingly. In the natural world, the peacock’s tail evolved in order to attract a mate, as the bright colours and markings of flowers did to attract specific insects. Similarly, in the ecology of commerce, the attractively presented storefront, pack, or brand – and that includes its advertising – has evolved because it seems attractive to more customers.
You could call this seduction (I dare say the peacock would, if he could talk). But the word is an ambiguous one. The cover of Dr Heath’s book reminds us that a primary connotation of ‘seduction’ is sexual, and in that context it may mean something close to rape, certainly something exploitative and damaging – think of Tess of the d’Urbervilles. On the other hand, it can be very pleasant to be seduced, and the survival of the species may depend on it. Ethical and value judgements depend on many contextual factors: who is seducing whom, what happens afterwards, and so on.
As an alternative to the idea of the cauliflower removing its leaves in a seductive deshabillé, we could consider its trimming as a rhetorical device. Rhetoric, the use of language to make an argument more appealing, was the invention of the ancient Greeks, who also saw the ethical dilemma it posed: teachers of rhetoric were sometimes attacked for the crime of ‘making the worse appear the better cause’. Many attacks on advertising are based on an assumption that it makes the worse appear the better cauliflower. But this begs the question of whether an objective standard of ‘better’ or ‘worse’ exists, and who is to be the judge of that? Attempts to control the trimming of cauliflowers, in order to aid quality judgements, might be in the interest of the village produce show, but what if aesthetic appeal is part of the value that the customer is buying? What happens when you try to impose a similar uniformity on cars, or chocolate bars, or handbags?
I suppose there may be boundaries where techniques of display, presentation and rhetoric become unfair, exploitative, or harmful. But our judgements of where these lie should not be biased by our own emotive use of language. Nor should we assume that subconscious decision processes are necessarily sinister, when we have increasing evidence that they are a universal and even valuable part of our human psychology. If the Rosser Reeves defence has been rendered untenable by modern science, then so, surely, has the Vance Packard attack.
Seducing the Subconscious: The Psychology of Emotional Influence in Advertising, by Robert Heath. Published by Wiley-Blackwell on March 21, 2012.
