3 Cognitive Tips to Build Your Brand in 2009

Using tools from the basic science of human cognition can help you differentiate your brand and get it off of the long tail (check out Chris Anderson's excellent Long Tail blog here).

In about 10 days, millions of people will celebrate and then crank out their New Year's resolutions. I say don't wait.

Today is the day to begin anew. Yesterday was the winter solstice, and today begins the best six months of the year: Every day will have more sunshine than the day before. What an exciting time to let science help build your brand and reach its potential.

This blog is about where the mind meets the message. In this case, the message is your brand. For many readers, their blog is their brand and their message. Make your brand effective.

1) Ensure that your brand has a personality

Stanford University professors Byron Reeves (my academic grandfather) and Cilfford Nass eloquently demonstrated in The Media Equation that people treat mediated messages just like they treat real people. That is, social rules apply.

Research in my lab and many others confirms that this extends to brands. We treat brands as if they are real people, and we form especially strong emotional connections when we feel that their personalities matches our own.

Seth Godin does a brilliant job with his blog. The blog has a personality, and that matches the personality of his books. It's a mixture of sagacity and informality (see the picture of half his head).

But Godin cannot simply pretend to be a sage, he must live up to it. He provides excellent insight, and he is a talented writer. If he had everything but writing skills, I assure you his pageloads would be far poorer.

His brand's personality is genuine. You have to mean it. As Lovemarks guru Kevin Roberts says, you must respect your customer.

So do some diagnostics. Ask people. If [my brand] were a person, who would it be. What would that person be like?

It may seem silly, but our data are always telling in this regard. Your consumers know your brand's personality. And if seven different consumers tell you seven different answers, you have an identity crisis.

Decide who you want your brand to be, and then make sure that everything that you do is "on message."

2) Pay attention to attention

I spend a lot of time studying human attention, and it remains one of the great puzzles of my lifetime.

William James said in 1890 that everyone knows what attention is, yet it's incredibly multi-faceted and complex to study.

Importantly, you should keep in mind that attentional capacity is finite. Every bit of your brand is competing with the rest of the world for attention.

You need to make brand communication compelling. Your message has to be the most relevant thing in the room, or you have no chance of keeping attention.

In the blog world, ProBrogger had a brilliant post about three ways to engage readers. Enagagement leads to attention. Find ways to meaninfully engage consumers with your brand.

3) Emotion tells your brain what to do

The overly serious ancient Greeks (and philosophers as recent as Descartes) that emotion and cognition were separate.

They're not. They are inseparable, and they are always working in concert.

You need to know that attention is motivated. Your brain may like to read literature, sip a fine French wine, and listen to Motzart, but it's number one job is to keep you alive.

So it is especially attuned to cues related to survival: food, violence, and potential mates.

Imagine that a naked person or a salivating tiger walked in the room right now. Regardless of how you felt, imagine not paying attention. Now look at standard book page with lines of black serif type against an offwhite background. Not so compelling, eh?

Sadly this is why there's so much sex in advertising.

I'm not urging you to add sex, but I do urge you to generate some excitement within your readers. Excitement leads to physiological arousal, which leads to attention (at moderate levels).

Don't be the News Hour of your product category. Be a little bit exciting. Understand that, for example, we like to look at people. So show people, for example. Find the appropriate emotional connection for your brand.

Just don't be boring. Attention is lost.

But don't forget about personality! Sex for sex's sake is stupid, and it draws attention away from your brand. Find a way to add emotion to your brand that is consistent with the brand itself.

Putting them all together

You still have to have a good brand and a good message. But getting your message noticed and remembered is no simple task.

Your brand needs a personality, and you need to be true to that personality. But if you pick a bad one, you're doomed.

Your personality and your message should be constantly engaging. There's simply too much world competing for limited attentional capacity.

Write from the heart, as Glen advises in an excellent post at PluginID about driving traffic to your blog.

Effective use of emotion will help you engage readers. Look at these human connections phrases in a recent post by eminent social media blogger Chris Brogan: "She remembered my name," "she was a book lover like me," "she loved hand-selling books," "She ...had lots of great conversational information," "I had a beer with him," "That is the feeling I want from social media." And finally:

It’s this thing where people can spend a few extra moments to make a human connection instead of an “off the shelf” connection.

That genuine human connection may be the most basic human emotion. Make those connections in a meaningful, genuine way, and 2009 will be a better year for your brand.

Finally, it's your turn to add to the conversation. How does your brand (or blog) make an emotional connection?

These Are a Few of My Favorite Things

I am a hopeless pack rat. Parting is not sweet sorrow.

Yesterday my wife unpacked a couple of pint glasses from the Blue Corn Cafe & Brewery in Santa Fe, N.M. They don't look at all like the ones shown on the Web site.

I found them when I unloaded the dishwasher today.

These particular pints date back to the weekend after my college graduation from New Mexico State in 1997.

It was a great trip ... especially because it was such an exciting time of adventure and things to come.

I don't drink out of them much. But I sure like having them. Seeing them upside down in the dishwasher today caused a great rush of positive affect and nostalgia. It was a great moment on a day that I woke up sick.

Need to Win Lottery So I Can Design Cool Stuff

I could have thought of this.

I should have thought of this.

With a little bit of help, I could have coded this.

I feel as if I missed out.

http://www.wefeelfine.org/

Real-Time Debate Emotion Fascinating

Last night I watched much of the John McCain / Barack Obama debate on CNN.

During the debate, they had continuous response measurement data across the bottom of the screen. That tracked real-time emotional responses (positive versus negative) across the bottom of the screen with separate lines for Democrats, independents, and Republicans.

Having collected such data in the lab, I was at times more interested in the lines than the candidates.

It also reminded me what a complicated topic emotion can be. Consider the case when the candidate you like (i.e., a positive emotion) attacks the candidate you do not like (i.e., attacks are a negative emotion).

In order to be able to respond in real time, you have to parcel out the good from the bad. And in the end, these voters exhibited that pattern. When McCain attacked, the red line went up. When Obama attacked, the blue line went up.

The critical line, I suppose, was the green line for independents. That line consistently but slightly favored Obama.

In fact, I was pretty amazed that all three lines tended to be slightly higher (I don't have access to the statistics) for Obama than McCain. These were voters from swing state Ohio, so this trend may be indicative or may represent the small sample. There is no way to tell.

Another interesting trend was all three groups' reactions to McCain's repeated pattern of insisting to talk after Jim Lehrer tried to cut him off. It seemed that no matter what McCain said, all three lines stayed low, seemingly punishing him for violating debate etiquite. Again, there is no way to know what they were thinking, but it was a rather consistent trend.

I may tape CNN next time and watch on another network. I like to see the CRM data, but with limited cognitive capacity and all, it is difficult to fully process the arguments while simultaneously tracking three groups' opinions.

Discovery Channel Seeks Emotional Connection

Shameless TDF plug from Velo News.

---

More businesses are getting it: emotion is what counts!

From an Adweek story:

"The Discovery brand 'is still caught up in the intellectual space,' said Dan Bragg, Discovery Channel client vp and creative director. 'The brand itself is not as heartfelt as our programming. So the marketing will try to move the brand to being more culturally relevant and more emotionally engaging.' "

Smoking Conquered; Obesity Is Next

In this screen capture from a Family Guy episode, a young "Death" wears a T-shirt that reads "Smoke Cigarettes." From many popular culture references such as this, it is evident that most people realize the health dangers from smoking. A recent Gallup poll suggests that Americans are now realizing the dangers of obesity.

---

Regular readers know that I have spent the better part of the past two months indirectly fighting diabetes. Not for me, but for rural Hispanics in West Texas.

We are currently testing public service announcements (PSAs) that we created over the past few weeks.

In the current experiment, we are showing the anti-diabetes PSAs along with some filler PSAs about smoking, AIDS, marijuana, and cocaine.

During an experiment the other day, master's student Wes Wise remarked that the battle on smoking was pretty much won. Now, he predicted, more efforts could be targeted toward obesity and related health problems.

Turns out that many Americans are at least acknowledging the danger of obesity. A recent Gallup Poll shows that Americans acknowledge that being significantly overweight is just as harmful to your health as smoking.

Of those polled, 83% said being obese was "very harmful" to your health, whereas 79% of Americans said smoking was "very harmful" to your health.

When we surveyed rural West Texas Hispanics earlier this year, we found that about half were overweight according to the Body Mass Index, and another quarter were overweight. That's more than two-thirds of those polled.

Echoing the diabetes problem, many of our experimental participants are self reporting family members with serious diabetes-related health problems. Many of the participants report having lost a loved one to diabetes.

According to the Gallup poll, 28% of Americans report that obesity has been a cause of serious health problems within their family. I would venture to guess that this number is higher among our populations of rural West Texans (of both Hispanic and non-Hispanic descent).

Although we will learn something from the current endeavor, PSAs will not be enough. Our focus group data has shown that there are two major causes of the current eating concerns: economy of time, and economy of money (thanks again to Wes Wise for coining these terms).

It's faster and cheaper to eat at the dollar menu. You can walk out of McDonald's absolutely stuffed for about $3.21 in Texas. Just order two double cheeseburgers and a 99-cent order French fries.

It's a lot of food. It's also a lot of grease. I just looked up the nutrition facts online. Each 99-cent double cheeseburger has 440 calories, 23 grams of fat, and 11 grams of saturated fat. Those 11 grams of saturated fat represent 54% of the recommended daily allowance for a 2,000 calorie a day diet. The medium fries add another 380 calories, 20 grams of fat, and 4 grams of saturated fat.

So your $3.21 bought you 1,260 calories, 66 grams of total fat, and 26 grams of saturated fat. With that one meal you have 128% of the saturated fat you were supposed to eat for the day.

It is almost impossible to get that much sustenance for that little money in any other fashion. And when you're broke with a lot of mouths to feed -- and I've been there -- it's difficult to look at the single bunch of broccoli that the $3.21 will buy.

Add to the fact that for most people, those fat and carbohydrate grams taste really good. There's a reason they taste so good: you get the most energy (i.e., calories) per gram with those molecules. When you're just trying to survive, fat and carbs keep you alive.

When I was a little kid, our house backed up against the old Missouri River bluffs, and much of that land was a park. Since the bluffs made a cliff, it was basically our private park since no one climbed the cliff to get there.

My father used to like to photograph the wildlife, so one day he put out a dog food bowl full of bacon grease. The animals went crazy. I believe raccoons would just lay by the bowl lapping up that congealed bacon grease as if it were pure heaven. Scavenging from trash cans had never tasted so good! [If dad will send a picture, I will post it here].

Their bowl of bacon grease is our dollar menu and all-you-can-eat buffet. You cannot get much more appetitive than that. And unlike illegal drugs where you can get arrested right now, the danger from overeating is distant. Your heart does not stop today. You do not have a stroke today. You do not lose your foot to diabetes today.

So you eat from the dollar menu today. You'll eat right tomorrow. Sadly, for too many Americans that healthy eating tomorrow never comes.

I'm not picking on McDonald's. They claim to be committed to Hispanics, and I am sure that they mean it. But combining the dollar menu with any economically disadvantaged population does not and cannot encourage healthy eating.

---

Our research project is funded by the West Texas Rural EXPORT Center, however, opinions shared here are solely my own.

Penney Eyes Lovemark; You Download Song

There is a great story in the New York Times about J. C. Penney's new emotion-based advertising campaign through agency Saatchi & Saatchi (read Lovemarks).

"And the message is resonating: one of Saatchi & Saatchi’s first television commercial for Penney, a series of fast-moving domestic vignettes that celebrate family moments big and small, has won praise from critics and viewers. The original song in the ad, 'So Say I,' has been downloaded 75,000 times on iTunes."

You will even be able to watch Penney-based Web reality shows on Penney's site.

This is more evidence, I hope, of emotion winning the day. Meanwhile, the ad/music/download nexus continues to be a fascination to current Texas Tech master's student Wes Wise.

Advertisers Come Around: Brain Matters

If you know anything about advertising, you probably know that television ratings drive advertising costs. The premise is simple, the more people watch, the more a "spot" costs.

But what do ratings really translate to? Eyes on screen. And we've been dissing that measure for years.

Over here in the psychophysiology world, we want to know how much attention you're paying and what is happening with your physiological arousal.

Now advertisers have discovered, kind of, these measures. They're calling it engagement (See the article titled "OMD Claims to Know How Rapt Audiences Stack up Against Your Average Eyeballs" at AdAge.com).

"Completed by OMD and presented to an Advertising Research Federation forum late last month, the research indicates that not only does consumer engagement with media and advertising drive sales, but it also can drive sales more than media spending levels. That suggests even a relatively small media outlay could work wonders should the ads draw keen attention from consumers within media they also find engaging, said Mike Hess, director of global research and consumer insights for OMD."

Well, of course!

Pick any metaphor you want, but it always holds true. Consider teaching. Is it more important to know how many students are in the class or how many students are paying attention to the teacher?

In his book, Lovemarks, Kevin Roberts, CEO Worldwide Saatchi & Saatchi, said, "I'm looking for research that counts the beats of your heart rather than the fingers of your hand."

Exactly.

And you do not need to pay OMD for their proprietary engagement tool. That's just foolish. Engagement equals:

positive affect + attention + arousal

It's just that simple. It's not what your eyes are doing. It's what your brain is doing. More specifically, it's what the combination of your brain and body are doing.

If all of your physiological signals indicate that you're getting ready to jump out of that chair and smother the television with a big, wet kiss, then the ad probably worked!

Negativity Bias on Television

A growing group of media researchers are guided by a notion that human emotion is guided by two underlying motivational systems, one appetitive (e.g., approach) and one aversive (e.g., avoid).

To grossly oversimplify the underlying theory, we believe that at low levels of intensity, the appetitive system wins out, and you explore. However, as things become intense, the aversive system wins, and you cut and run.

This system allows you to explore during peaceful times and stay alive during chaotic times.

Much of the related theories were developed by studying how people respond to affective photographs (specifically the International Affective Picture System). When people have been asked to rate many pictures, you can plot the average arousal ratings and the average valence ratings for each picture.

When you do this, as unpleasant pictures become arousing, they become more unpleasant relatively quickly. Pleasant pictures, however, are slower to become extremely positive as they become more arousing. If you draw a trend line for both pleasant and unpleasant pictures, the slope of the line is "steeper" for unpleasant pictures. This is called the negativity bias.

Recently I became curious how such a scatterplot would look for television clips, so I gathered descriptive statistics for 68 clips I have used in various experiments (my friend James also sent some descriptive statistics that I did not have time to work in here).

As you will see here, we see the exact same effect with short 30-second television clips. As unpleasant clips become more arousing, they become much more unpleasant. However, as pleasant clips become more arousing, they are not much more pleasant.

Cool.

In the interest of full disclosure, this is because we kept it "clean." For the photographs, the really pleasant pictures show naked couples in erotic poses. Since we're not studying pornography, the only sex scenes among these clips were subtle.

Arousal Takes Time: Insight from Latencies

Instead of doing the work I had to do Saturday, I spent some of the day working on old data. I love to work on data, so this was a much better way to spend the late afternoon.

These data kept bringing me back to time. Time matters a lot.

In a recently published article, Dynamic, embodied limited-capacity attention and memory: Modeling cognitive processing of mediated stimuli (read PDF here), I make an argument that time matters.

But I do not really do time justice in the model. Time matters a lot more than even I have acknowledged.

Consider the current data. We showed participants 30-second television clips varying in valence and arousal. Thus, positive and negative clips were shown that varied in arousal. In total, there were 5 levels of arousal.

After each clip, we asked participants how arousing the clip was, how negative the clip was, and how positive the clips was. These were 7-point scales ranging from "very" to "not at all."

The question is, how do you make that decision? How do you decide how arousing/exciting a clip was? Do you search your memory? And, of course, the most interesting question to me is: how do you search your memory?

If something was really arousing, then judging its arousal value should be easy, right?

Wrong, it turns out.


You see, arousal is not just another variable. It is exactly what I argue it is in the Media Psychology article cited above: a dynamic, embodied variable.

Imagine if I ask you how often you see a co-worker. Presumably, you see her five days a week. So as soon as you attempt to search your memory, you are going to immediately retrieve many exemplars of that co-worker.

So it's an easy question. It's also an easy question if I ask you how often you see someone that you rarely see.

But what about someone you see somewhat regularly?

In several data sets that we have (and the data of others, such as Ohio State's Russ Fazio), those moderate decisions take more time to make.

But arousal, as I stated above, is not just another variable. Instead, physiological arousal gets you going. It helps you move. It pumps the heart to get oxygen to muscles all over the body. Fight-or-flight is driven by arousal. When you watch something arousing on television, it reaches in and grabs a hold of your sympathetic nervous system and shouts: do something!

So when I ask you how arousing something was, you should begin to think about that thing. And if the stimulus was really arousing and you try to access that memory -- especially the memory of how arousing it was -- the memory should trigger the earlier arousal.

And that triggered arousal should invoke automatic cognitive processes that attempt to divert limited capacity attentional resources away from the arousal-judging task and to the stimulus itself.

If this is the case, then arousal judgments should get slower as the original stimulus became more arousing. If the subsequent judgments are only a matter of "counting" how many arousal-related features were in the original message, then those judgments should speed up as a function of arousal.

Our data support the first interpretation. See the figure above. As the content became more arousing (i.e., as the label on the X-axis increases from 1 to 5), the latency of the response increases from 2,300 ms to 2,700 ms. Thus, it took these participants almost a half second longer to make arousal judgments about arousing stimuli. And those seem like the easier decisions.

Although the figure is far from perfectly linear, the linear trend is strongest, F(1,53) = 10.82, p = .002, eta-squared = .17 (sorry non-stats readers). And this is for raw response latencies. That is, these data include trials where participants started daydreaming and took 30 seconds to answer the question.

Time matters. Sure, if you look at the self-report data, the arousing content was rated as more arousing (also a linear trend). But the answers to the questions do not tell the entire story. I need to know what you responded, and how look it took you to do it. The response latency data help tell the story.

Emotion is not just something we manipulate in the lab, as Peter J. Lang once argued during an address to the Society for Psychophysiological Research. Instead, emotion is a property of the individual. Emotion is a survival-oriented trait that helps keep our eyes focused when attention is crucial and allows them to wander when surveying the landscape is more adaptive.

I've tried to keep a focus on time, but I am realizing now that I have not done enough. Time is on my mind. I hope it's on your mind, too.

Gladwell's Blink: Speedy Cognition

Although I hope to expand upon this in a future post, I am enjoying reading Malcolm Gladwell's Blink, which arrived today from Amazon.com.

As a scientist, I tend to favor academic outlets to mass market ones; however, there is something impressive about the ability to translate complicated works into easy prose.

Since Blink dovetails closely with my research, I am far too late in reading it.

If you haven't read it, I highly suggest that you give it at least two seconds.

Dr Pepper: Lone Star Lovemark

Most days I quite love my job. I love going to work every day trying to figure out how the brain works. Earlier this week, I was in the lab running an experiment.

One of the experiments we are doing involves having participants look at brand logos. We measure, among other things, activity in the facial muscles associated with smiling and frowning.

Bored as I was to be in the lab yet again, I was staring at the screen watching the anonymous participant's physiological reactions.

When the Dr Pepper logo popped up ... wow! The blue line indicative of activity over the orbicularis oculi muscle group went through the roof. A huge smile. [We're not measuring zygomaticus major activity this time, which I will explain later].

Huge smile!

You see, Dr Pepper hails from Texas. They pretty much love it here. I love it, too. It is a Lovemark of mine. Theirs, too.

And I think that it is too, too cool that when they see the logo they cannot help but smile. Imagine sitting in an overly warm room with a bunch of wires stuck to you. You're there only for extra credit. You just want to get done and get out of there.

But then you see the Dr Pepper logo. And you cannot help but smile.

Too cool.

Tampa on My Mind

I spend most of my working hours trying to figure out who is going to remember what and under what circumstances. We make some progress, but there is no shortcut to unlocking the human mind.

Life ticks by at a pace of 365 days a year. I've lived well over 10,000 of them by now. Most are lost within my neural network. Some stand out with amazing clarity: the days my kids were born, my wedding, my Ph.D. graduation, and the horrible hangover the day after my Ph.D. graduation.

Those are obvious candidates to recall. Yet others are not -- at least not to the degree to which I continue to think of them.

In the spring of 1997 (eee gads, a decade ago), we were busy working in the student newspaper at New Mexico State. Someone got the idea to go to Florida for spring break, and our friend D's father, Jake, lived in Tampa.

Off we went. Emily, D, Angie, and I.

The trip was great, and I remember a great many things: Ybor City, Busch Gardens, Paradise Island, Emily's misfortune on the Interstate. What I remember most was Jake's condo.

As condos go, it was not extravagant by any means. But it was moderately high up, located on the intracostal waterway, and it had two wonderful patio doors to let in all of that tropical air.

The Gulf of Mexico was only a few hundred yards to the west, and you could hear the waves at night.

The tropical air and the sun were so incredibly peaceful.

I think about the condo a lot. It's my happy place, so to speak.

Jake has long since sold it. Emily, D, Angie, and I have fled New Mexico for Texas, Illinois, and California. Yet that Tampa tropical air remains indelibly stained upon my mind.

On stressful days in stressful weeks in stressful months, I can close my eyes and still smell that air and see the boats travelling back and forth on the intracoastal waterway. It's a rare moment of peace for an otherwise frenzied mind.

Toddler Story Packs Powerfully Sad Media Effect

Today we finish data collection for a study investigating (the cognitive processes behind) how television colors your perception of social reality. I say this to illustrate that I study how the media make you think it is a "mean world," to use a term popular in the literature.

I just finished reading an absolutely horrific story on CNN.com. I'd link directly to the story, but that would mean I would have to go back and look at the page.

And I cannot.

The summary is that Pittsburgh police allege that a man left his 2-year-old toddler outside to die in the cold.

That's extremely sad.

But then I read the next part. The part about little footprints around the body, suggesting the toddler got up and wandered a bit before succumbing to the cold.

And then I lost it. I couldn't even look at the page.

If you don't have kids, you won't really get it. But if you have kids, you will understand how a story such as this reaches right into the core of your being and shakes something primeval. A whole new chamber opens in your heart when you have kids, so to speak.

I was raised a male in America, so I can pretty much witness any atrocity and not shed a tear. It's an adaptive thing, really. But if you start telling me a story about someone hurting kids -- and that almost always comes from the media -- I cannot take it. It's the worst kind of torture. You cannot hear that and not think of your own children.

The funny thing, to me, is that my knee-jerk reflex to this story is to want to go get my kids out of school and hug them. Because it's a sick *$&#ing world. And for that moment, I just want to know that they're safe.

Percentage-wise, it's a pretty safe world. But the fact that even one person might have specifically tried to freeze their kid makes for a pretty twisted world.

Sure, my kids have driven me to the brink of insanity. They can push every button that I have. But I cannot imagine ever wanting to seriously hurt any of them even for a moment.

Emotion drove me to click on the link to that story, and stronger emotion drove me to click away from it. That's why I study media psychology. But I sure wish I hadn't read that story.

Negative Is Intense; Positive Is Frequent

Almost every time that I read a "classic," I am pleasantly surprised. Those old guys (and gals) were pretty damned smart.

I'm not talking about Homer.

I'm talking about research.

I was preparing for my undergraduate research methods class on Wednesday, and I needed a nice, simple research concept to illustrate theories and hypotheses.

The problem in mass communications, however, is that there are insufficient theories, and many of those that exist are bad. And I couldn't invest an entire class period explaining the theory. It was supposed to be about the concept of theories.

All of a sudden, the "mere exposure effect" popped into mind. I've talked about it a lot, but I am never read the seminal work. Thanks to the Internet, I had the piece within a few minutes. Officially, it is:

Zajonc, R. B. (1968) Attitudinal effects of mere exposure, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 9(2), 1-27.

And it's awesome to read. Several studies. Very clever. Even used skin conductance.

The gist is that if I show you something with no pre-existing semantic attachments, the mere exposure to the stimulus will create positive affect toward it. They did this with made-up words and Chinese characters (among non-speakers).

For several stimuli, there was an almost linear increase in positive attitudes withe the logarithm of frequency exposure. So, if you saw the Chinese character 5 times, you attributed positive meaning to it. However, if you saw it 25 times, you attributed even more positive meaning.

All of which is cool. But intermixed in the article was an even cooler finding, which I had never heard about. If you take some corpus of language, the good words appear more often than the bad.

For almost ever pair of words tested in a semantic differential (e.g., good _:_:_:_:_:_:_ bad), the positive word was far more frequent in the lexicon than the negative word.

Too, cool, right? We know that "negative information weighs more heavily upon the brain," but positive information weighs more frequently upon the brain.

But have we all become cynical bastards since 1968? To test this, I used my new favorite tool, the Icerocket.com trend search. I did a trend search for "good" and "bad." The results are below. So even though the blogosphere is often thought to be reserved for rants and political attacks, we still say "good" more than twice often than "bad." It's a fine day to be a scientist, friends.

Emotional Power of TV Still Amazes Me

I spent a lot of years trying to find a job that I loved. I gave up along the way and went back to graduate school. Then a funny thing happened: I accidentally found a job that I love.

I spend my time trying to understand the power of TV's emotion. Why do silly stories written by people I'll never meet move me so?

Sometimes when I am writing a manuscript, it will feel as if I am overstating things. And then I watch the television, and I understand that I am overstating nothing.

Grey's Anatomy was on tonight. George O'Malley's father dies. My father was in the hospital this month (he's better now). That made the fictional TV show a little too real.

I survived tonight's episode only by silently repeating "it's only a story" in my head over and over. It also helped to read the scrolling school closings along the bottom of the screen.

When I took introduction to theatre at NMSU, they talked about the "willing suspension of disbelief." It seemed plausible at the time.

But now it is completely absurd. When you sit down in a theatre or in front of a TV, the narrative starts to grab a hold of you. Eventually it will get you, and you will be sucked in. The suspension of disbelief is automatic. In fact, you have to work damned hard to keep the disbelief going.

This is an endless fascination to me. I'm like a kid in a candy store. Figuring out how this works in the brain is too cool.

P.S. I was over at the Texas Tech Health Sciences Center today, and none of those people looked like the people at Seattle Grace. Hmmm. They might be lying to us. Well, there was this one really cute nurse.

Building brand loyalty

In an ideal academic world, research and teaching feed off one another. In my observation, this is too seldom the case. Recently I accidentally backed into such an overlap involving the human connection with brands. For several years, I have been interested in the emotional relationship that humans make with inanimate brands. During a recent class that I taught at Indiana University, I showed part of an excellent video from Frontline titled The Persuaders. During this video, Saatchi & Saatchi CEO Kevin Roberts talks about his book, Lovemarks: The Future Beyond Brands.

Roberts talks about building “loyalty beyond reason.” Others in the video dismiss such connections as infrequent. However, if you reflect upon your own life, you will see many connections beyond reason. How many generic brand labels fill your cabinets? For most people, there will be few or none. Pepsi. Starbucks. Tide. Abercrombie & Fitch. Although many of these brands may be superior in quality, they cannot be superior in proportion to their increased price since they spend so much on advertising. Thus, much of the extra money that you pay for a brand name goes into advertising to reinforce your brand relationship.

My curiosity piqued, I am now moving my research agenda in this direction. I am exploring Roberts’ notion of loyalty beyond reason. I am not formally trained in marketing, but I do know a thing or two about attention, emotion, and memory. I am going to use this training to drag the brand relationship into my psychophysiological laboratory. Hopefully, I will help elucidate this loyalty that moves beyond reason. Stay tuned. The results will find their way here.