Blog
Classical Conditioning in Marketing
In marketing, Classical Conditioning is a form of associative learning where your mind is intentionally trained to associate different behaviours or feelings with products or brands. As an example, if you ring a bell before you feed your dog it will learn that the bell means food and will eventually start salivating at just the sound of the bell.
Many organisations use this strategy to associate their products with an emotion or action to help sell their products or differentiate their brand. What comes to mind when you see or hear these slogans:
The above businesses are trying to associate phrases and feelings with their products to influence your behaviour so the next time you hear ‘yeah right’ you immediately think ‘Tui’ or when you're about to buy your next drink you might choose Coke because you associate it with happiness.
Of course, you may not be influenced as the businesses intend because of a previous bad experience or preference for a different brand but it's still important to know how these brands are trying to influence you. It's also not necessarily bad. The slogan might just be something like "Think Different" used to differentiate a brand from it's competitors by promoting one of it's core values.
Now for a local example. When I started my first Internet company back in 1997 my slogan was "Professional Web Design and Hosting". I know it's not very inspiring and doesn't make you salivate or passionate about my brand but just using that word "Professional" made a huge difference because customers would ask what it meant and I could demonstrate how much better we were than our competitors. My latest slogan is a bit cheeky: "Internet Marketing and Web Development Experts. We're just better." Again, it's saying that we're better than our competitors which encourages people to think of Spinning Planet that way which of course is true.
If you're interested in where this idea of Classical Conditioning originated watch this video:
Here are the phases shown above with the logos included:
Did you find this blog helpful? If yes, please share or like.
brynn :-)
About
Brynn- Like this post? Share with your friends:
