TV strategy: The art of subconscious seduction
Dr Robert Heath
Admap
December 2014
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TV strategy: The art of subconscious seduction
Dr Robert Heath
Admap
December 2014
TV strategy: The art of subconscious seduction
Dr Robert Heath
University of Bath School of Management
TV ads that are information heavy and aimed at consciously persuading the viewer to purchase your brand rarely
succeed; whereas ads that appeal subconsciously to human emotion, building empathy, have a track record of
success.
TV strategy
This article is part of a collection of pieces on perfecting TV advertising strategy. Read more.
Successful brand-building TV advertising is 99% subconscious seduction, 1% conscious persuasion. A lot of you will see this
statement as pretty controversial. Perhaps the sort of thing you might expect to hear from someone who is trying to sell you a
book entitled Seducing the Subconscious. OK, I'd love you to buy my book, but I truly believe this statement sums up the
reality of TV advertising in 2014. And I think by the end of this short article, you may well agree with me.
So how did I reach the conclusion that brand-building advertising isn't really about persuasion? Well, I've had an odd sort of
career: three years marketing, 22 years as an account planner, seven years in market research, and 13 years an academic.
But it's a career that allows me to know what I am talking about: I have been the person in the strategic hot seat for campaigns
such as The Marlboro Cowboy', Kellogg's Supernoodles, the Castrol Oil drip, 'I bet he drinks Carling Black Label', Heineken
'Refreshes the Parts…', and, perhaps most famously, Stella Artois 'Reassuringly Expensive'. All these TV campaigns, and
many others I have worked on, built immensely strong brands. And they built those brands with barely a shred of persuasion
being present in the advertising.
Of course, much of this depends on how you define persuasion. If by persuasion you are just talking about getting someone to
buy something, then a rational claim can be very handy. The other day I saw an ad for a £16,000 Mercedes 200 Coupé. That price briefly persuaded me that buying one might be a nice idea. But, as the work of Damasio and others has shown, it was
only able to persuade me because I already had a favourable opinion of the Mercedes brand. And favourable opinions of
brands are not created by conscious persuasion, they are created by what I call subconscious seduction.
'Whoa there, buddy,' I hear you say.
'Where's the evidence for that?' Well, yes, there are a number of ways I can support this claim.
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2 The first comes from a system I developed back in 2005 for measuring the perceived amount of emotive and informational
content in an advertisement. This system, called CEP®Test (Cognitive Emotive Power Test), has been used to test over 6,000
ads. In order to validate the CEP®Test, we ran a simple test. We took 43 currently on-air brand-building TV ads in the US and
UK, measured the favourability towards the brands, and then established (by showing the ads) who had, and had not been,
exposed to the ads. We then cross-tabulated the favourability scores against exposure to see which, if any, of the ads had
produced an increase in favourability. Finally, we did a correlation against the emotive (seductive) and informative
(persuasive) scores the ads had achieved.
The result? There was no correlation between the perceived information in any of the ads and an increase in brand
favourability. In other words, for those 43 ads, the persuasive information had no significant effect on favourability. But, when it
came to the perceived level of emotive content, we found a significant 56% correlation with an increase in favourability. In
other words, it was the emotive content – the seduction – that built favourability towards brands, not the message (Journal of
Advertising Research, December 2006).
There is an academic theory which supports this result. The behavioural psychologist Paul Watzlawick developed it from
working with couples whose relationships were in trouble. What he found was that changing the things couples said to one
another – the communication or message – had pretty much no effect on their relationship. Even when people said nice things,
the relationship would stay bad. However, he found that if you changed the way they said things – what he called the
metacommunication – then the relationship improved, even if they still said nasty things. Of course, metacommunication is
exactly what ad agencies do really well. It is the creativity: the tone of voice, casting, narrative, all the non-verbal emotive stuff
that clients find so hard to swallow. 'You want me to pay how much for that director?'
Here's a case study to prove this point. All of you will be familiar with the famous Cadbury's Dairy Milk ad in which Garon
Michael dressed as a gorilla and played the drums to the famous Phil Collins song In the Air Tonight. Many of you will also be
aware that it delivered an astonishing 9% increase in Cadbury's Dairy Milk sales. What you may not know is that it increased
favourability towards Cadbury by 20%, and resulted in a sales increase across all of Cadbury's product range.
Six months later, another ad was produced, this time featuring a group of airport trucks racing along a runway to the Queen
classic Don't Stop Me Now. Fallon, Cadbury's ad agency, was perplexed that this ad had no effect on sales or favourability.
Out of curiosity, we tested both these ads using the CEP®Test. Both ads scored pretty much zero for perceived information,
with 'Gorilla' scoring ten and 'Airport' three out of 200. In other words, neither was seen to have a persuasive message (or
indeed any sort of message) about the product.
The difference was in the perceived emotive content: 'Airport' scored 90 out of 200, a little below average; 'Gorilla' scored 167
out of 200, close to maximum. Proof, I'd say, that if you want to build a strong brand, it is the Emotive Power – the seduction –
you need, not the persuasive information.
For those still sceptical, Les Binet and Peter Field's 2007 analysis of 880 IPA Advertising Effectiveness Awards case studies in
the UK found that: "Emotive campaigns – those that rely on emotional appeal rather than just information and persuasion –
tend to be more successful at building brands than those with a rational product message, even in highly rational product
categories…"
At this point, I could rest my case. But for some further support, let's look at just one of those 880 ad effectiveness case
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3 studies.
In 2001, the struggling mobile network brand Cellnet, fourth in the market behind Orange, Vodafone, and One2One, rebranded
itself as O2. To celebrate the name change, O2's agency, VCCP, launched a TV ad campaign, which mainly comprised air
bubbling through blue water. There was nothing said about the coverage, or the prices, or indeed any aspect of what the
service offered, mainly because O2 had nothing very special to offer: the network was no better or cheaper than any of its four
competitors. All that was shown was some people flirting, a girl floating, a dog catching a ball, and some doves fluttering. The,
arguably vacuous, strapline was 'O2: see what you can do'.
Now I don't know about you, but I've never regarded air bubbles and blue water as an especially persuasive reason for
connecting to a mobile phone network. I have to confess that I (at the time working with Taylor Nelson) was among those who
predicted the brand would sink without a trace. How wrong I was. Despite a total lack of any performance advantage and a
totally unpersuasive ad campaign, O2 went from last in the market to brand leadership in just four years. How did it do that?
According to the IPA Ad Effectiveness entry, simply because as a result of the advertising the brand felt "…calm and serene,
the antithesis to clutter and chaos, a contrast to the often frenetic world around mobile phones".
Not exactly what you would call persuasion, definitely more like what I call seduction. And, what is more, subconscious
seduction. Research has shown that successful brand-building TV advertising campaigns like O2 and Cadbury's 'Gorilla' tend
to deliver their emotional messages without you really being aware that they have done so. A study I carried out using a
selection of advertising for brands in the UK showed that those with high levels of emotive content were processed with less
attention than those with high levels of rational message. Partly, this is because emotive content is processed automatically
without any thinking going on. Partly, it is because if an ad is emotively empathetic, you tend not to feel threatened by it; and if
you are not threatened there is no reason to try to counter-argue its effect; and if there's no reason to counter-argue, there is
no real reason to pay attention; and, of course, if you don't pay attention, then you can't counter-argue the influence of the
emotive content.
Here's another example. Earlier I mentioned the Stella Artois 'Reassuringly Expensive' TV campaign. Some of you may be
saying, wait a second, isn't that a persuasive message? Doesn't it persuade you that Stella is made with the highest-quality
ingredients, evidenced by it having a much higher price? Well, it might have been persuasive during the seven years the brand
was advertised in print; but by 1992, there were dozens of premium-price lagers in the UK, and Stella wasn't more expensive
than any of them. It was, frankly, daft to expect anyone to be persuaded to buy it because its high price suggested high quality.
So what we did is keep the message (people like to feel there is a message in advertising, even if it isn't especially new), but
change the strategy to 'people will give up anything for a Stella'. Of course, all the ads were fantasy situations, so it wasn't
expected that anyone would be persuaded to buy Stella because they genuinely thought it was so good that people would
give everything they had to buy it. What we expected was that people would be seduced by the Provençal countryside, the intriguing stories, the art-house movie music track, and the exceptional drinking shots. And that is exactly what happened.
Stella became the UK's biggest, and most profitable, beer brand within two years, which I would say proves that it worked.
But how do I know the 'Reassuringly Expensive' message wasn't behind this success? There are two reasons. First, the ad
failed in a Millward Brown Link Test; indeed, Millward Brown famously recommended it be ditched. Second, when we did a
CEP®Test on the ad some years later, the 'information power' was well below average at 27/200. That confirms the ad was
not perceived as having any persuasive information. But the 'emotive power' was 147/200. So it may not have been
persuasive, but it was certainly seductive.
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4 The question many clients ask is how you 'legislate' in your TV ads for this seduction? You can, of course, test for 'emotive
power', which can be done nowadays through Nielsen, whose TV 'brand effect' now uses the latest version of the CEP®Test
measures. But you can also work with the ad agency to understand exactly how the creative approach is going to build
empathy with your target audience. I believe the practice whereby clients simply approve a verbal proposition in the TV ad
strategy and then leave the ad agency to do everything else needs to be consigned to the dustbin. After all, effective
advertising is everyone's responsibility, it's not all down to the ad agency.
So pester the ad agency to keep you posted with their ideas; and, when they present you with their recommendation, make
them explain why it is going to cause the consumer to warm to your brand, and see it as empathetic and creative and
imaginative. If you just leave it all up to them, don't be surprised if the ad agency incorporates your proposition into some
bizarre award-winning creation that your customers absolutely loathe.
In summary, if you want to use TV advertising to build a strong brand, then my advice is worry less about how your ad is going
to 'persuade' your consumers, and instead spend a lot more time thinking about how it is going to 'seduce' them.
About the Author
Dr Robert Heath is a creative effectiveness consultant and associate Professor of Advertising Theory at University of Bath
School of Management. He is also the author of Seducing the Subconscious.
[email protected]
Read more articles on TV strategy
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The power of TV
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