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Priming The Mental Pump: A Branding Experience

Guest post by: Jerry Bader

Article Overview: It appears that creating a well thought-out experience for an audience triggers actions and reactions buried deep in the primitive area of the brain that is related to our most basic survival instincts that override the areas of the brain associated with more modern rational analysis.

Priming The Mental Pump: A Branding Experience

When I was a kid in grade school, if your penmanship was up to par, you were given a straight pen. My guess is most people today have never used a straight pen or even a fountain pen. You really have to be ancient or a pen freak to bother. But what I remember most, is the frustration of using a new nib, it seemed to take forever to get it working by cleaning the nib and priming it with ink. Without priming the nib first all you had was a pointed stick, useless for writing, let alone anything else.

The idea of priming is not just a physical phenomenon; it is a psychological one as well. Psychologists at Yale ran a study reported in the New York Times by Benedict Carey, in the article, 'Who's Minding the Mind?' University students entering a lab were stopped by a lab assistant trying to juggle books, a clipboard, papers and either a hot cup of coffee or a cold iced-coffee. The participants were asked to help by holding the coffee. Shortly after holding the coffee, the students were asked to rate a hypothetical person.

What the study found was, students who held the cold iced-coffee rated the fictitious character far colder, more selfish, and less social than the students who held the hot coffee.

Many studies have been done that confirm this effect, whether it's leaving a hidden pale of water mixed with a cleaning detergent, triggering subjects to cleanup after themselves or pumping the smell of fresh baked bread into a room causing people to drool all over their laptops as they scurry to grab whatever food happens to be handy.
Web-video A Psychological Priming Tool

This phenomenon known as psychological priming can be used as a powerful Web-marketing method if combined with the appropriate use of webmedia. Of course they haven't yet figured out, thank goodness, how to use smell-a-vision over the Web, but we have tools like audio and video, that we can use to prime an audience to more favorably react to a marketing message.

It appears that creating a well thought-out experience for an audience triggers actions and reactions buried deep in the primitive area of the brain that is related to our most basic survival instincts that override the areas of the brain associated with more modern rational analysis.
Personal Branding, Ego, & Branding Disaster

As Web-video has increased in popularity and acceptability over the last few years, more and more companies have experimented with how best to use the medium. An effective Web-video campaign can deliver your brand image combined with vital content so that your core, marketing message is understood and retained; on the other hand a badly executed campaign will make your firm look like a bunch of amateurs.

The difference between effective and destructive Web-video branding has nothing to do with extravagant television-style productions, and more to do with creative concept development, perceptual processing, and professional presentation.

We often recommend the development of a video host or representative, who can speak directly to your audience delivering style and substance, content and concept, image and personality. At the same time we caution clients against using a non-professional, like your company president or director of sales. It's not an accident that actors look better, sound better, and appear cooler than the rest of us. It's all part of priming an audience's desires for whatever is being sold but first we must have a coherent presentation concept that focuses attention on the image and message we want to present.
A Coherent Presentation Concept

The Web is a unique platform that combines the elements of information, advertising, and entertainment. As a marketer you have to stop using concepts designed for other forms of communication and start thinking of the Web as a unique presentation environment. The Web is more than an encyclopedia, catalog, or brochure, more than radio, and more than television. The Web is different, and if you want to be successful on it, you have to adopt a new mindset.

Like athletes that try so hard to be perfect they continually fail, Web-businesses have to step back from the hype, the assault of specifications and statistics and the onslaught of rational justifications, and become more intuitive to the audience's psychological makeup. You can try so hard to make the sale, to justify and persuade, that your audience will stop listening.
A Presentation Concept Must Have Legs

A coherent concept must have legs, that is, it must be a strong enough idea that it can be rolled out and sustained over a multi-presentation campaign. Investing in advertising is a waste of money unless it is part of a sustainable marketing campaign.

Creating a positive brand image that embeds in the minds of your audience depends on the processing fluency of your Web-video presentations. The ability to easily absorb the presentation depends on a combination of conceptual and perceptual resonance.

Perceptual resonance is based on the ability to grasp meaning from the verbal, visual, and emotional content of the presentations, and on the associations and experiences these stimuli trigger.

Conceptual resonance relies on the audiences' ability to grasp meaning from the presentations based on format, exposure, repetition, and ease of understanding.

The predictive context and semantic association of the scripted dialog creates a positive reaction based on an increased ability to grasp meaning from the overall experience. The professionally executed, presentation primes the qualified prospect to accept the core marketing message delivered.
Professional Presentation:
Branding Through The Storytelling Construct

We sometimes forget websites are communication vehicles for saying what you want people to hear, but if your audience doesn't understand what you're saying you've wasted your time and theirs. Meaningful communication is not a singular exercise, it's the sum total of multiple presentation techniques starting with form. And one of the best formats for presenting material that is meant to be memorable and persuade is the story construct.
The Story Construct:
Beginning-Problem, Middle-Consequences, End-Solution

A story consists of a beginning, middle, and end. But even a well-formatted story won't have much impact unless someone has something at stake, that someone in reality is your audience, who is represented and guided through the experience by the surrogate online Web-character who presents the problem (the beginning), elaborates the consequences (the middle), and furnishes the resolution (the end). There are many different ways to interpret and deliver this commercial format but they all rely on a stylish presentation of the problem, its consequence, and the proposed solution.
The Performance

The ability to absorb content is based on how well it is designed and how expertly it is delivered. It shouldn't be so heavy-handed that it irritates or so complex that it confuses, but it should be engaging enough to induce your audience to watch it again and even to pass it along to colleagues and friends.

There are numerous verbal and visual techniques that can be employed to engage an audience and prime them for action. Being creative doesn't mean you have to reinvent the wheel: slip streaming techniques using familiar themes, voices, music, universal truths, and classic scenarios can all be used in creative ways to make even the driest content more palatable.

After The Fact

Not everything works and sometimes things that work don't work the first time you try them. In the long run good concepts, professionally delivered will succeed if you give them a chance and stick with them. A brand, an image, and an identity are built over time with a sustained expert effort based on a consistent approach and a strict adherence to a focused core message.

What makes Web-video such a powerful Web-branding tool is it's ability to prime your audience to react positively to your message when delivered in a compelling memorable manner. And unlike other forms of marketing communication it is relatively affordable to create and implant allowing for the sustained effort necessary to establish and maintain your brand identity.

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  SO WHAT’S ALL THIS ABOUT BRANDING?
  Finding Inspiration

Article Tags: baked bread, benedict, cleanup, clipboard, cup of coffee, detergent, drool, fictitious character, fountain pen, handy web, hot coffee, hypothetical person, new nib, new york times, penmanship, physical phenomenon, psychologists, straight pen, university students, webmedia



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