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It is in our nature to want to be a part of something, to have a sense of belonging, whether it is through religion, political affiliations, or sports team allegiances. The same applies to brands—people identify with the brands that best suit them. This explains how companies and brands influence human psychology(the basis of relationships between brands and consumers)and how scientific research can be conducted to analyze it and possibly manipulate it.
How many times do you check your phone per day? Five, twenty, fifty times? According to Apple, iPhones are unlocked 80 times a day. On average people tap, type, and swipe their smartphones more than 2,600 times a day. How did Apple get us so addicted to our phones, and why is it important for us to constantly check them? The explanation resides in our brains and can be explained in one word：anxiety.
Where does this anxiety come from? Dr. Nancy Cheever led a research team on the relationship between cellphone use and anxiety. In an experimental demonstration, electrodes were placed on a reporter's fingers in order to measure changes in heart rate and respiration. The analysis showed his reaction as Dr. Cheever placed his phone out of reach and sent him a text. When he received the notification, his respiration and heart rate increased. The anxiety was caused by addiction withdrawal. Though this experiment shows that we have an addiction to our phones, it is important to understand how people developed this addiction in the first place. When we receive a notification on our phone, the brain releases dopamine, a compound present in the body as a neurotransmitter, which briefly relieves that anxiety. Because of the pleasure dopamine provides, we keep checking our phones to get a“hit, ”like a drug.
How are brands using that feeling of anxiety to attract people? Consumers form relationships with them. Instagram blocks your account if, after reaching a certain number of followers, you stop publishing on your account. Instagram pushes you to stay connected. Many people talk to their devices, and some may even develop feelings of love or attachment for their device's brands. How many times have you heard a friend saying, “what would I do without my iPhone!”It is important for companies to understand why we love some brands more than others, and a key question in consumer—brand relationships is what causal processes lead to love or attachment for a brand or a device. Studies have been carried out to understand how a consumer may feel love for a brand. A brand is a set of elements：product/service, communication, and identity. Real de Madrid was a brand before it became a football team. There is a relationship between a consumer's personality or self-concept and the image the consumer perceives of products. The integration of the brand with the consumer's self and the consequent self-congruency between the brand and the consumer will lead to love for that brand.
It is widely recognized that companies channel their product and brand messaging through people. Consumers nevertheless remain unaware that they serve as brand ambassadors when they assume the voice of the company and its offline marketing. Online marketing encourages consumers to transmit a message. “Viral marketing is only an effective marketing tool so long as it encourages consumers to take action as a result of the message.” Humans are programmed to share information with their entourage. Doing so maintains social links and even our own sense of self through the products and services we consume. It is thus necessary for a company to stimulate this natural trend of interacting with others through word of mouth, and particularly over the Internet, which accelerates the effect of buzz. The speed at which information travels through viral marketing strategies enables companies to reach a broad target. Diffusion of information is characterized by a pyramidal propagation, and a transmission speed exponential gives the transmission the quality of an epidemic. The theory of viral marketing is described as a contemporary marketing technique capitalizing on the efficiency of the Internet and the credibility of virtual word of mouth as being more potent than traditional methods of communication. Word of mouth is seven times more effective than personal selling and twice as ef fective as advertisements on the radio in influencing the sales of household electrical goods and of food. The author Jay Levinson confirms that, for small and medium enterprises, word of mouth produces a quality of credibility much more potent than commercial advertisements.
Given consumer apathy towards the saturation of advertisements, brands have to reach consumers'hearts, not just their minds. As in the film Metropolis , the mediator between the head and the hands is the heart. Advertisements, whether they are executed through guerilla marketing or buzz marketing, will resonate if they connect with human emotions. If companies can reach the heart, then consumers are more likely to share information about them through word of mouth. If word of mouth occurs via social media or any other digital platform, this will enable companies to collect the necessary data to acquire a comprehensive judgment of consumer behavior relevant to their branding campaigns. And if companies know what matters to consumers on an emotional level, then it is easier to manipulate them.
The consumer's love for a brand or object depends upon the integration of the object/brand with the consumer's self. In theorizing this scenario, the consumer self is made up of two dimensions：a real and an ideal self. When the integration reaches a certain level on those two dimensions, the consumer feels love for the object, the product, or the brand. What is the last thing you do before sleeping and the first thing you do when waking up? You check your messages on your cellphone. You cohabitate with your cellphone unconsciously. One study proposed another approach to explain how a consumer feels love for a brand based on brand personality and its congruence with the consumer's personality. The authors found that both actual and ideal self-congruence have a positive impact on the consumer's attachment to a brand. In fact, as soon as the brand possesses human attributes, consumers will tend to identify themselves with the product and move less hesitantly toward purchasing it. This is shown particularly in a study by psychologists in which they conclude that the brand provokes emotions giving rise to feelings of joy for consumers. Joy and happiness are important emotions that can be seen in many of the advertisements before videos on You Tube.
Today's brands make funny, aggressive, emotional or conspicuous advertisements online(for example, a giant banner when you are watching a video on Dailymotion or You Tube)or offline(a giant billboard for Daredevil on the street), and do not hide their goal：to get you to buy what they are selling.
Some brands differ in their ability to elicit heightened feelings from consumers. Companies better understand deep unconscious desires and use this understanding to manipulate the wills of consumers in order to sell more products.
This manipulation can be seen in the following example, where the understanding of the customer was not arrived at by an AI, but by human beings. I was staying at the Luxor Hotel in Las Vegas. At one point, a beautiful woman approached me to pitch a wrinkle-removing product derived from the mud of the Dead Sea. She asked me many questions about my skin, collected personal information, analyzed my face, and so on. I told the woman I had worked in the cosmetics industry for many years and did not believe her product had the ability to eliminate wrinkles. In my extensive experience, when products say they will remove wrinkles, they oftentimes will decrease or soften them, but the wrinkles will still be plainly visible.
The woman encouraged me to try the product to demonstrate its effectiveness, which she said would be apparent five minutes after application. I agreed. She told me to pick a spot on my face with wrinkles I wanted to eliminate. I chose my laugh lines. The woman applied the product to one side of my mouth and left the other side untouched to allow for a before-and-after comparison. After five minutes, the woman gave me a mirror to view the results. I was shocked—the product seemed to have had a remarkable ef fect based upon a comparison of the treated and untreated sides of my face.
At first, I thought it was the mirror that caused the changes I was seeing. Then I thought it might be the lighting. I even pulled aside a random stranger and asked whether there was a noticeable dif ference, which the stranger affirmed. I then asked the woman pitching this seemingly miraculous product how much she would charge for a jar of it. Of course, the woman said that there was a special sale that day that would enable me to buy two jars for＄160. I scoffed and decided against buying it. I told the woman I was sure there was a trick, and that the product really had not caused any major changes.
After being pestered by me for some time about what the trick was, the woman finally caved. In her pitch, the customer is asked to provide the marketer with a particular set of wrinkles(e. g. , the wrinkles to the side of the eyes)on which to demonstrate the product's allegedly marvelous properties. If the wrinkles are more visible on the left side of the eyes, the saleswoman will put the cream on the right side of the eyes. The woman explains that the wrinkles on the opposite sides of the face are not the same：one side will always be somewhat worse than the other. Hence the woman applies the product to the side of the face where the wrinkling is less pronounced. Based on a small quantity of information, the manipulation supporting the sale was complete.
Imagine now a world where a large quantity of information is available everywhere. You do not have to look too far；a giant cosmetics company is already working on smart screens and magic mirrors in stores where an AI similarly analyzes your face using facial recognition.
Artificial intelligence affects the nexus between brand and consumer by building and maintaining customer relationships. Automatically attending to a giant quantity of data helps brands efficiently understand customers and sell them the products that they want in a way never done before.
By using AI, brands can target individual customers based on their behaviors by using personalized offers, and as a result consumers feel like the brand knows them better, ultimately fostering a loyal relationship. But one particular phenomenon has come to dominate marketing strategy：the fear of missing out(FOMO) pushes consumers, specifically millennials, to be constantly connected in order not to miss anything. The FOMO phenomenon, inexorably linked with social interactions, collection of data and ergo AI, is much stronger than the buzz and word of mouth that we have observed over the past 50 years because it comes from consumers themselves.
When was the last time you had dinner with your spouse without checking your cell phone? Being on your cell phone all the time transforms buzz into fantastic word of mouth, and encourages you to leave more and more data about yourself, which is then used to pitch brands and products to you. In a study conducted by Allianz, more than 55% of people were found to have experienced FOMO and 57% spent money they had not planned to spend because of what they saw on social media feeds. A majority of those surveyed(88%)believed that social media fuels a tendency to compare one's wealth/lifestyle with others.
The theory of self-promotion further shows that people seek to present the best image of themselves to be in the good graces of others, to be appreciated, etc. In fact, people, in their social interactions, are very much oriented towards this quest to make the best possible impression on others. Having been presented this in the form of data, brands come to know consumers more and more, all the better to manipulate them.
The researcher Chetochine admits that the evolution of consumer purchase behavior from the rational to the emotional proves that the multiple-choice Internet civilization of today is“intensifying frustration.”It is pushing boundaries while affirming that“the brand is not a result of reasoning for a consumer but a result of an emotion expecting pleasure.”In the 1950s, marketing professionals assumed consumers made purchases in a rational manner, and thus focused their advertising messages on the functional attributes of the product. Rationality is not enough anymore. Today, thanks to increasing competition, consumers are constantly exposed to a growing number of competing products and ads. Brands are aware that the proliferation of choices online is becoming less attractive to consumers due to increasing frustration with choices they did not explicitly make. But even if the situation of JOMO(joy of missing out)occurs, it remains marginal.
People are supportive of AI technology that can help them. For instance, Siri and Google Assistant can schedule appointments, and Alexa can order products. Digital voice assistants are popular because they allow users to interact with their devices without having to use their hands. Apps have been created for entertaining people analyzing photographic data(e. g. , Snapchat can transform your face using different filters, Facebook can tag you in photos)；if the consumer collectively trusts AI in their tools for taking selfies or in their digital assistants, individuals will develop greater awareness of and exhibit greater compliance with the attendant group norms, even if they personally disapprove of or fear AI technology. While there is individual dissent, there is collective acceptance of Ai. With such acceptance, as more AI is implemented and integrated into our lives, brands will use AI to their advantage in collecting and analyzing data. In any sixty seconds, more than 400 hours of content is uploaded to You Tube, analyzed and methodically interpreted. The same goes with the 65,000 photos uploaded per minute to Instagram. Why would we not trust entities capable of forming a comprehensive understanding of us and predicting our individual needs?
While many of us may fear AI, throughout most of our lives we have adapted to technology's increasing requirements to divulge our data. For instance, in the past when you needed to find a personal file, you just input a command on the keyboard attached to whatever machine you were using. But as technology continuously evolves, people are quick to jump on the bandwagon for the latest and greatest gadget or software, becoming more and more addicted without considering the ramifications. Instant gratification does not coincide with instant foresight of the consequences. It has become an expectation rather than the exception. For instance, consumers expect responses quickly if not immediately. As technology provides greater ease and convenience, if consumers take a Rolling Stones approach(“I Can't Get No Satisfaction”)or a Veruca Salt approach(“Don't Care How I Want It Now!”), they may get what they want right now, but this mindset impairs them from seeing the perils that lie ahead. By getting what they want when they want it, consumers are decreasingly likely to question or even be aware of a brand's system of manipulation.
Consuming data or consuming without consequence to satisfy personal desires is also found in other areas of our lives, such as food and clothing. Why do consumers turn a blind eye to this? Is it because they only care about their own desires? As the late Steve Jobs said, “Your customers don't care about your product, service, or business. They care about themselves and their hopes, dreams, and ambitions.” And they believe in and trust the brands that can support these interests.