The Science of Communicating & Marketing Your Business

Susan, my wife, knows this and I trust her to pick out furniture that I'll be comfortable in. She makes the first pass, I get called in to determine cushiness, and then we go home and wait for the appropriate furniture to be delivered. Imagine my chagrin when she showed me her first choice, a post modern bauhaus piece...

...What surprised me was how comfortable it was despite its look.

Did I get you there? Did your mind do that little thing where it attempts to take two incompatible information streams and make them coherent and compatible? The reason for your confusion has to do with what psychologists and linguists call priming. Basically I primed you for a furniture/couch/comfortable experience and presented you with a non-furniture/couch/comfortable image. The majority of people seeing the image after the priming will go into a small fugue state as their mind throws more and more cognitive resources into either convincing itself that yes, that's a couch or yes, Joseph's a nutcase.

Did it again? Gave you two "yes"s that slowed you down a second because you expected a "yes" and a "no"?

We're going on an arc about how to get brands remembered. More to follow...

Please contact NextStage for information regarding presentations and trainings on this and other topics.

I'll be speaking at the San Francisco April '07 Emetrics Summit on Quantifying and Optimizing the Human Side of Online Marketing on May 7, 2007. Come on by and say hello.