Read posts written by Aaron Reid on Sentient Decision Science’s implicit market research blog.
In 1996, behavioral psychologists Ulf Dimberg and Arne Öhman sought to test if the human mood is independent from its immediate external environment. Their study, Behold the wrath: Psychophysiological responses to facial stimuli investigated the affect of primed facial gestures on the participant’s mood. When I present these findings in talks, I usually tease that […]
Winning Olympic gold in skiing requires a certain risk vs. reward profile. The old saying saying of “without risk, there is no reward” certainly holds true, but just how much risk is the right amount of risk and what motivates people to take that risk instead of playing it safe for a more secure outcome? […]
Imagine you’re at the top of the men’s Super G at the 2010 Olympics. You are the reigning Downhill season champion and three days earlier you were favored to win the Downhill, you finished in a disappointing 6th place. You’re 35 years old. Twelve years ago you took the Silver at the Nagano Olympics in […]
Our goals in life can be activated without our awareness. This unconscious activation of goals results in subsequent behavior aimed at achieving those goals (Uleman & Bargh, 2004). This means that we often are pursuing goals that are important to us, without knowing whether or why we are pursuing them. Marketing, since it’s inception with the advent of sexual reproduction (Reid & Halgren, 2009), has been using the recipe of unconscious goal activation to great success.
Today, our lives are inundated with elegant creative executions of advertising stimuli that tap into our most fundamental human needs to stir our emotional associations with brands. On SuperBowl Sunday, with a captive audience ready to be entertained, the table was set for the unconscious activation of consumer goals by brands looking to embed their message deeply in the consumer subconscious.