Essay on Motivational Research by Bea Imagerie

Tutor group: Sam Thomson, Creative Histories and Industries. 2012. Content: Research project. Title of essay: What is Motivational Research By Miss Janika Nate Bea Date: 04/2012

I have found that I have always been the girl at the back of the room observing the people around me, always trying to figure out why they behave the way that they do. My own self analysis leads me to believe that this was perhaps because I forever sought to interact with other people appropriately. I was inspired when watching the television series; ‘The Human Animal’, (part of a BBC nature documentary series in 1994), by biologist Desmond Morris, where he presents a study of human behaviour from a zoological perspective (BBC, 1994). Having recently attended seminars conducted at the University of the West of England, by Sam Tompson in 2011, where I was introduced to the way an audience are influenced by media generated materials, constructed to influence our beliefs, behaviours and targeted to individuals in relation to the way we were brought up, gender and experience. Again this looks at human behaviour and examined our personal positions in societies. During research on a different subject at UWE, I came across the program; Selling The 60’s, shown (BBC4, 2011). The program was about the advertising men at Madison Avenue in New York and the advertising boom that occurred in America in that era. Most significantly, there was a piece on Ernest Dichter, who was described by the narrator, Denis Lawson as; “The doctor Strangelove of the Madison Avenue boffins was Ernest Dichter, the inventor of motivational research.” Further to this statement came further a statement from James Surowieki, a business columnist for the New Yorker newspaper, who says; “Ernest Dichter, the Viennese psychoanalyst who comes to the United States and turns himself into the great magician of the consumer economy by really, at least in his mind, what he was doing was really figuring out why Americans wanted to buy things and therefore allowing co operations to tailor their products or tailor their advertising to appeal to the deepest desires of Americans.”(BBC4, 2011) Ditcher says: “Modern man quite often tries to work off his frustrations by spending on self gratifications. Modern man is eternally tying to fill out his own self image by purchasing by purchasing products that complement it.”(BBC4, 2011) I wanted to verify Ernest Ditcher and found this which gave me a second report of his existence and background; “The advertising industry started to use increasingly sophisticated techniques. Ernest Dichter founded the Institute of Motivational Research in 1951.” (Pincas and Loiseau, 2008) These statements and research findings lead me to believe that motivational research analyses human behaviour for economic and marketing purposes and that Ernest Ditcher is at the forefront of this research. At this point I was already aware that there were tactics in place to encourage people to buy things. This came from having a casual conversation, up to five years ago, with a supermarket manager, who told me that products within a store, in aisle and on shelves were carefully placed, in specific ways to entice consumers to buy them but was unaware of how this was done. As a graphic design student, I find it fundamental to know the thinking behind the construction of all media materials to efficiently create designs so they are viewed in the way I want them to be seen. Our research project brief was to ‘research your question’ and with the above interests in human behaviour, my question is; what is motivation research? In the program, Selling The 60’s, we are made aware of the developments in advertising and the introduction of motivations research by Ernest Dichter, to Madison Avenue’s advertising agencies, in New York, in the 1960’s.

Ernest Dichter, (Viennese psychoanalyst), wanted to know what motivates people to buy and applied psychology to existing marketing analytical research to allow marketing co operations to construct their products and advertising strategies to increase consumer sales. In an interview by John Crichton with Bill Bernbach, Bernbach replies to the question; What qualities do you look for in creative people? “Well, mostly in creative people I look for a deep insight in human nature. Because I think the real basis into persuasion is to understand what motivates a man.” (Imseng 2009) Bill Bernbach then reads out a piece for a lecture he had given to a university: “The writer is concerned about what he puts into his writing, the communicator is concerned not just with what he puts into his piece of writing but what the reader gets out of it. He therefore becomes a student into how people read, and how they listen. He learns that most readers come away of their reading not with a clear, precise detail registration of its contents on their minds but rather with a vague misty idea which was formed as much by the pace and the proportions and the music of the writing as by the literal words themselves and he learns that the reader reads with his ego, his emotions, with his compulsions, his prejudices, his urges and his aspirations and that he plots with his brain to rationalise the facts until they become the tools of his desire”. In this interview Bernbach tells us what are the qualities he looks for in a creative person which is really useful for me and that this quality of having an insight into human nature is of foremost importants to being successful in the advertising field. Bernbach then describes how this is done by being a person who understand how other people work in order to communicate with them, in the same way I would think of learning Spanish in order to communicate with a Spanish person. Bernbach then quotes Aristotle whom he describes as “a pretty intelligent salesman who said that you don’t persuade people through their intellect, you do it through their passions.” This shows that the first thoughts of motivations may have started with Aristotle. In the acknowledgements of the book: Motivational Marketing: (How to Effectively Motivate Your Prospects to Buy Now, Buy More, and Tell Their Friends Too!) The author writes: “To Antony Robbins, who gave me the gift of understanding human emotion and how emotion affects the decisions we make in life. Motivational marketing has been a decade in development, and I have tested what I share with you in this book with thousands of companies in dozen’s of industries and the results have been nothing short of impressive.”(Imbrial. 2007). This explained to me that motivation research was an ongoing practice as I was not able to find many books with motivational research, in relation to marketing, in the title so I could look at what motivational research is now in comparison to its beginnings in the 1950s and 60s. This also shows human emotion forms motivation research. I could not find in the rest of the book, evidence of how research was conducted or where the finding originated from. Looking at the definition of motivation in the Oxford online dictionary I found the note “entry from US Dictionary, which I found interesting as this shows that motivations research is still mainly associated with being an American based practice. The rest of the definition reads as follows: “Of motives, especially those influencing the decisions of consumers. The psychological or sociological investigation.” Which explains that this research is based on psychology and sociology. In the book ;Handbook of Visual Analysis, (Van Leewen and Jewitt. 2001) I found evidence of indirect psychological analysis being applied from a study on children to adults who work for industries. The authors write; “The Chapter on psychological analysis (Chater 6), written by Gertaud Diem-Wille, a Viennese psychoanalyst specialising in the treatment of children, within the special context of the psychoanalytic session, children produced drawings that are based on the same primary representations as dreams. Their meanings can therefore be brought out through psychoanalysis, just like those of dreams. Diem-Wille then goes on to apply this method to what could be called a socio-psychoanalytical of what drives highly successful career men and women.”

I find this to be an example of how psychoanalytic data is related to the fields of economics in the same way Ernest Dichter has applied psychology to the economics of marketing. I found these two passages which gave me further information on what motivational research is about and also looking at another point of view from the founder of motivational research; “It was this increasing concern among marketing and advertising professionals that they were losing contact with the marketplace that encouraged them to turn to the methods developed in the social and behavioural sciences as a means to understand consumer needs, wants, desires and fears. In particular, advertisers and marketing managers highly prized the insights available from sociologists, psychologists and psychoanalysts who could provide ideas on conscious and unconscious human motivations. Information that was especially sought after, in particular, related to ‘the unconscious or hidden ideas, associations or attitudes of the consumer in connection with . . . [a] particular product’ (Weiss and Green, 1951: 36).” (Tadajewski. 2006, p.6) And; “These researchers had received extensive psychological training and perceived the opportunities available in the market and consumer research industry for the application of psychological theory to actual market problems. In addition, they were well placed by virtue of their training to appreciate the epistemological and methodological limitations of consumer research (Dichter, 1979).” (Tadajewski. 2006. p6) This shows a background of how and why motivational research came about, that marketers were looking at different ways to sell more products in expanding their existing techniques. This also show how the consumer research industry applied psychology to problems they had encountered during their own research. I found a new term in short film, entitled ‘The future ethics of advertising and mind invasion’, which talks about the use of subliminal messages in advertising, the term ‘Neuromarketing’ is described by the narrator as; “At the moment a new trend called neuromarketing is occurring using something similar to the Bush election strategy by taking neuroimages wilts people watch scenes, camera angles, cultural symbols and such, marketers and movie makers are learning how to get the best emotional response to a photo or video scene possible. Something as simple as camera angle or a difference in lighting, companies could increase your opinion of them without actually changing the message at all”. (anubis2814, 2011)

image from the video This raises a significant question, what is ‘neuro marketing’ as I know that the word ‘neuro’ concerns brain activity and in some ways so is psychology, so what is the difference between difference between motivation research or motivational research or motivations marketing and neuromarketing science? (if there are any). I looked at the definition of neuromarketing which is not a word included in the dictionary (Oxford dictionaries. n.d) though I found this: “But what is neuromarketing, and why should you care? Neuromarketing is a private endeavor more than an academic discipline, so a clear definition is difficult to come by. Generally speaking neuromarketing is the practice of measuring nervous system response to marketing messages. Tools range from high-end Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) scans to lower-end measures of heart rate, breathing rate, and “galvanic skin response”. More specifically,

neuromarketing seeks to measure brain activity to determine which marketing is most effective”(Williams, 2010). I found the name, Gerald Zaltman in an online article. “Bringing together theories and tools from disciplines ranging from psychology to neuroscience, the Mind of the Market Laboratory at Harvard Business School attempts to define and qualify consumers’ and managers’ thoughts and feelings about an array of ideas, from “loyalty” to “privacy” to “chocolate.” The work is spearheaded by the lab’s co-director, Gerald Zaltman, whose patented interview method, the Zaltman Metaphor Elicitation Technique (ZMET), is the foundation of the MML’s data-gathering process. “What we’re doing is using metaphors, idiomatic expressions of consumers, as vehicles for them to transport what may exist below their level of awareness into a domain of awareness,” Zaltman says. “Basically, we help the consumer open windows into their own thinking. We encourage them to look in, and share with us what they see.”” (Harvard Gazette, 2000). Looking for a second verification of Gerald Zaltman found this article which reads; “Four years before the term neuromarketing was coined, Professors Gerald Zaltman and Stephen Kosslyn of Harvard University16 filed a patent for “Neuroimaging as a marketing tool”; however, Zaltman quickly shifted his focus to the “Zaltman Metaphor Elicitation Technique,” a structured interview that does not employ imaging technology, and Kosslyn appears not to have been involved in neuromarketing until 2008, when he joined the advisory board of a company called NeuroFocus. 17,18”(Fisher and Chin and Klitzman, 2010). This shows that Gerald Zaltman who has filed a patent for the use of neuroimaging for the marketing research purposes. Zaltman writes: “Open minded managers are extending their own comfort zones to explore unfamiliar disciplines, or community of thinkers which share the same habits of mind about theory, procedures or methodology, and knowledge usage. For example, neurological research revealed that people don’t think in linear, hierarchical ways; figuratively speaking, they don’t experience a cake by sampling a sequence of raw ingredients. This insight prompted companies like Citybank, Disney, Kraft, McNiel Consumer Health care, and John Deere. They’re now drawing on previously ignored research from an array of disciplines-musicology, neurology, philosophy, and zoology, along with more familiar fields of anthropology, psychology, and sociology amongst others to understand what happens within the more complex systems of mind, brain, body, and society when consumers evaluate products.” (Zaltman, 2003, p. 5) There is a chapter which explains neuroimaging, it reads; “Advances in the brain sciences have spawned new questions and provocative new answers regarding the mind’s workings. Innovative technological methods for studying the brain have accelerated this process. These technologies involve neuroimaging. “Brain scanning techniques that produce pictures or functioning of neurons.” Through neuroimaging techniques, researchers can directly observe people’s brain actively while individuals engage in various mental tasks. These rapidly improving technologies promise to revolutionize the study of consumer behavior.”(Zaltman. 2003, p. 117) This shows how science other than human psychology, is now involved in the research of consumer behaviour by using brain scanning to evaluate responses to mental tasks, this means that marketing can be tailored to gain a subconscious response. Dichter looks into the human psyche to explain consumers’ motivations to buy, he explains that: “Buying can be a form of escapism. It gives us the impression that we can control our destiny. People often go out and buy something to get rid of a frustration. Particularly when things seem to close in on you and you feel there is little you can do, going out and spending money gives you the belief that you are not completely helpless.”(Dichter, 1960 page 175) In the introduction to the transaction of Dichter’s book Arthur Asa Berger writes: “What Dichter did, in essence, was to use psychoanalytic theory and depth interviewing in new ways. He did not use psychoanalytic theory to deal with neuroses, personality problems and relationship difficulties of individuals but to deal with unconsciously held attitudes and beliefs that help explain that most mysterious matter-why people act the way they do.”(Berger, 2008.)

There are suggestions included by Ditcher and Zaltman, on how to design advertising which investigates the way visual imagery can be constructed to induce forethought and memory recall to the viewer; “Here are several rules that psychologists can provide on how to choose the moment that sells: 1. The moment chosen must permit projection into the future. The listener must be capable of visualising what will happen during the next few minutes or hours. The family seated in a car about to go on a trip leaves a chain of associations in the reader’s mind, permitting him to visualise to a certain extent the experience of this family in the car. 2. Insight into the past. The family could also be shown having come home from a long, exhausting, but wonderful trip in the new car, getting out of the car, the kids bringing their treasures into the house, such as minerals, flowers, etc. Again the reader would be capable of seeing into the past as to what has happened before. 3. Sudden recognition must be provided. A “Gee, that’s true” kind of feeling must take place. Many of the Saturday Evening Post covers do exactly this. When in a scene, parents are shown admiring the landscape and the view from the skyline drive, but the kids instead are studying comics without paying attention to the beautiful scenery, the reader gets a “aha” experience. “Yes, this has happened to me too. I’ve never expressed it as sharply, but I remember, I recognize myself.””(Ditcher, 1960. p. 174) “In the primary experiment, respondents watched and evaluated a movie trailer, and the received critic’s reviews (positive or negative). Later they were tested for their memories of their previously formed judgments. Those that received the positive information believed they had initially been more favourable in their rating of the movie and those that received the negative critic information believed they had not enjoyed it.” (Braun and Zaltman. 1998.) review article and page number This shows that although there are differences in between motivational research and neuromarketing there are similarities using the same technique of researching the functions of human memory. My own conclusion drawn from my research is that motivation research is based using human psychoanalysis of consumer behaviour as a means to structure marketing. The motivational research process was continued since it’s foundation in the 50s and 60s and further developed in the marketing field. Neuromarketing is the progression in the study of motivational research incorporating neuroscience to get a biological view of what motivates consumers to visual stimuli and thus tailor advertising and marketing to provoke a desired response from the audience. Both types of research have the same aim; to help marketers to construct their marketing strategies to get the best visual results and to induce sales of products and services.

I began thinking of how significant and relevant neuromarketing is at this time is a good question as when entering the key word neuromarketing in the library database for all UWE libraries only one book came up, so what does this mean? I find this significant as the UWE campus is base to marketing courses so I was expecting to find more books on the subject. Here is the list of the chapters in the book, The Advertised Mind, which shows clearly that his book concentrates a large part of its content to psychology, neurology and mechanisms of the human mind in relation on how to use these to advertising. The content chapters includes as follows; 1 How advertisements work 2 Approaches to the human mind 3 Psychologist’s models of learning and memory 4 The structure of the brain 5 Neurons: the building blocks 6 Learning and emotion

and a few more “Advertising works by establishing feelings, associations and memories in relation to a brand. These associations must come to mind when think about a brand, ideally when considering a purchase, if they are to have any effect on our behavior. Emotion, by helping to stimulate and guide attention, helps create and reinforce the associations created by advertising.” (Du Plessis, 2005) Although the words ‘motivations’ is not mentioned in this passage, this uses the motivations research theory applied to advertising with the use of emotion and memory in the same way as Dichter and Zaltman have done which then leaves me wondering what is the difference between marketing and advertising? Definition of advertising: “The activity or profession of producing advertisements for commercial products or services”. (Oxford online dictionary) Definition of marketing: “The action or business of promoting and selling products or services, including market research and advertising”. (Oxford online dictionary) I finss that there is not a big difference in the definitions as the two profession’s ultimate goal is produce strategies to sell products and services, though it seems that research activities are undertaken by marketers which result in advertising strategies. This shows me that the books which are about marketing and advertising include motivations analysis and neuromarketing techniques to form the core to which all marketing and advertising operates on.

Bibliography: Selling the Sixties, 2011. [TV program] BBC, BBC4, 23rd November 2011. 20.00 Van Leewen, T and Jewitt, C.,2001. Handbook of Visual Analysis. London: Sage Publishing. Imbriale, R., 2007. Motivational Marketing. US: John Wiley & sons, inc. Available at Anubis2814, 2011. ‘The future ethics of advertising and mind invasion’. [video online] Available at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oGI1FJiSWhw&features=player_embedded#! [Accessed 22nd of January 2012]. Harvard University, Harvard Gazzette, 2000. Professor’s survey method opens ‘windows of consciousness’. [online] Available at: http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2000/05/professors-survey-methodopens-windows-of-consciousness/ [Accessed 21st of February 2012]. Braun, A K and Zaltman, G., 1998. Backward Framing Through Memory Reconstruction. Marketing Science Institute. Working paper Report No. 98-109. Zaltman, G., 2003. How Customers Think. US: HBSPress. Dichter, E ed., 2008. The Strategy of Desire. USA: TA Transaction. Dichter, E., 1960. The Strategy of Desire. USA: Doubleday and Company. Fisher C. E and Chin, L and Klitzman, R., 2010. Defining Neuromarketing: Practices and Professional Challenges [e-journal] available at: http://www.ncbi.nlm.gov/pmc/article/pmc3152487/ [Accessed: 21 st of February 2012] Williams, J .2010., Neuromarketing – Add it to the Marketing Toolbox.[online article] Available at: http://www.visibilitymagazine.com/disc-inc/jenniferwilliams/neuromarketing-----add-it-to-the-marketing-toolbox# [Accessed: 21st of February 2012] Du Plessis, E., 2005. The Advertised mind .London and Philadelphia: Millward Brown and Kogan Page. Pincas, S and Loiseau, M., 2008. A History of Advertising. China, London: Taschen. Oxford dictionaries., n.d. [online] Available at: http://oxforddictionaries.com/ [Accessed 06th March 03/2012] Tadajewski, M. 2006. Remembering motivation research: toward an alternative genealogy of interpretive consumer research. [PDF] Available at:www.uk.sagepub.com/ellis/.../chapter %201%20-20Tadajewski.pdf > [Accessed 21st of February 2012] Imseng. 2009. Bill Bernbach ½. [video online] Available at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vUs5-3Y6vxM&feature=player_embedded# ! [Accessed 22nd of January 2012]

My Blog address:

http://vanezapage.blogspot.co.uk/

There are links to the sites and videos mentioned in my essay on the Blog page entitled: research project links to sites and viewing list http://vanezapage.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/research-project-links-to-sites-list.html