PERSUASION Y

ou live in a world of advertising. You probably wake up in the morning to the sound of the radio filled with songs, the chatter of DJs, and a few ads. Your morning paper has ads interspersed with the stories. There are billboards on your morning commute, commercials on television, and even sideline ads at sporting events.

Have you ever really stopped to think about how advertising affects you? Clearly, advertisers are hoping to change your behavior. They want to influence what you buy and how you think.

If you think about advertising at all, you probably focus on persuasion. That is, many ads try to introduce you to some new product or service and give you enough information about it to get you to consider a purchase. For example, somewhere in this magazine is an ad for my new book Smart Thinking. You may not have heard of the book, and so the ad aims to let you know about it and (hopefully) get you to think about whether it might be something you want. Magazines like this one have lots of ads for local businesses and services, and you probably learn a lot from these ads.

Most of the advertising you encounter, though, doesn’t really fit this mode. Unless you have been living under a rock, you have seen countless ads for the soft drinks, detergents, department stores, and car brands that are most frequently advertised. If you already know about these products, then why do companies still pay to advertise them?

Perhaps the most powerful effect of ads is called mere exposure, and it was first discovered by psychologist Robert Zajonc and his colleagues in the 1960s. As they observed, we are wired to be mistrustful of new things. The first time you hear a new song or see a new product, you treat it with some skepticism. Seeing it even once, though, makes you like it a lot better. That’s why the audience at a concert goes crazy for the song that has been playing on the radio. They like it better, just because they have heard it before.

These mere exposure effects are so powerful that they can overcome people’s beliefs about the quality of the products themselves. Studies have shown that even after you see a new product that you think has great features, you still prefer to purchase a product you have heard of before. Advertising has done its work by making you more comfortable with the products that have been advertised.

Worse yet, you don’t realize the effect that ads are having on you. When people are stopped in a supermarket and asked why they have chosen the products they have, they talk about the price of the products and their quality. Yet, when you look at what people have purchased, the items in their shopping carts are often highly related to what has been advertised recently.

If you don’t want your behavior to be affected by ads without your awareness, what should you do?

You might think that you should do your best to ignore the ads around you; however, that strategy is likely to backfire.

You are able to identify product logos in under a second. Once you have seen the logo, the mere exposure effect is already at work. If you try to look away from the ads, then you will still recognize the logos, but won’t know why the products around you look so familiar. As a result, you’ll be even more prone to like products just because you have seen them before.

Instead, take a real look at the ads. That way, when you see the products later, you will be reminded of the ad you have seen. Then, you’ll know why it feels familiar.

Of course, if you really want to minimize the effects of advertising on your life, make sure that you also give yourself some ad-free space. Take a walk in a park, read a book, or go to a concert.