What if we could make carrots taste better without changing carrots in any way?
What if we could make voting more fulfilling without doing anything to voting conditions?
What if we could make driving a new Ford Mustang more thrilling without changing anything in Mustang manufacturing?
We can.
What we see, feel, taste, or smell depends to a great degree on what we expect to see, feel, taste, or smell. Art historian Ernst Gombrich tells us that no eye is “innocent.”1 What the eye sees depends, only in part, on what is there to be seen. What the eye sees also depends on what it expects to see. No eye, no sense, is without expectation.
Our mind does not use sensory data alone to create our perceptions. Our mind combines input from our senses with our ideas about the world and past knowledge to create our perceptions. The physical characteristics of the stimulus contribute to perception through what psychologists call bottom-up mental processing. Expectations and prior knowledge contribute to perception through what psychologists call top-down mental processing. What we experience about the outside world is a result of both.
Perception is an unconscious process carried out by the lizard inside, our automatic mental system. Expectation guides perception.
Without expectation, perception is much slower. The influence of expectation on perception is an advantage for us humans because expectation speeds up the process of perception and allows us to more quickly approach pleasure or avoid pain. Expectation steers perception unless the stimulus is substantially unlike the expectation.
Different expectations and prior knowledge can lead to very different perceptions of the exact same thing.
Reading down, the figure in the middle of this set is clearly 13. Reading across, the figure in the middle is clearly B.
We see what we expect to see. If we change the expectation, we can change the experience. If we expect a carrot to taste a little better, it will. It won’t taste completely differently, but it will taste a little better.
Thomas N. Robinson is a doctor with the department of pediatrics, Stanford Prevention Research Center, Department of Medicine. Dr. Robinson and his colleagues, in a carefully controlled experiment, gave children, aged 3 1/2 to 5 1/2, two separate servings of five different foods—hamburger, chicken nuggets, french fries, 1-percent milk, and baby carrots.2 The research assistant who presented the food to the child sat behind a screen that separated him or her from the child. The child saw an arm reach around the screen to present each food, but the child could not see the body or face connected to the arm. The procedure must have been a little creepy for the child, though equally creepy with both test food and control food. For each food, one serving was packaged as from McDonald’s and the other was similarly packaged, but unbranded. In each case, the McDonald’s labeled food and the unlabeled food were actually identical.
For all five foods, the children said the food labeled as from McDonald’s tasted better. In four out of five cases, all but the hamburger, the children’s preference for McDonald’s labeled food was highly significant. The McDonald’s label created an expectation of better taste that influenced the children’s experience. McDonald’s labeled carrots tasted a little better than other carrots even though the carrots were physically the same. The children responded that way not because they are children, but because they are human.
For adults as well, the experience is different depending on the expectation.
Working for Anheuser-Busch, we traveled around the country talking to beer drinkers. They would often tell us that drinking a large quantity of certain brands of beer would give them headaches, but drinking a large quantity of other brands of beer would not. We noticed the brands of beer that were reported to give people headaches in one market were not the same as the brands reported to give people headaches in another market. The pattern became clear. The unpopularity of a brand in a market seemed to cause the headaches, rather than its chemical content. If Busch, for example, was unpopular in a market, beer drinkers described Busch as a brand that, in quantity consumption, caused headaches. On the other hand, if Busch was popular in that market, beer drinkers described Busch as a brand that did not cause headaches.
A beer drinker expects headaches from drinking a large quantity of an unpopular brand of beer and he gets them. A beer drinker does not expect headaches from drinking a large quantity of a popular brand of beer, and he experiences and remembers less discomfort from that consumption.
If we expect voting to be a little more fulfilling, it will. If we expect driving a Mustang to be a little more thrilling, it will. If we expect using public transportation to be a little more enjoyable, it will.
Samuel McClure is a member of the department of Psychology at Stanford University and director of Stanford’s Decision Neuroscience Laboratory. McClure, et al.3 measured the preference and brain activity of people drinking colas, both labeled and unlabeled. They found that people preferred the taste of labeled Coke to the same product unlabeled. No big surprise there. The surprise lay in the brain activity. They found that several areas of the brain “respond preferentially” to brand-cued Coke. In other words, even though the physical characteristics of the beverage were identical, the brain reacted differently when the beverage was labeled “Coke.”
The experience of drinking labeled Coke was different from the experience of drinking unlabeled Coke, not in an imaginary way, or an illusory way, but in a real way. Expectation is capable of changing the way the brain responds. Expectation is capable of changing the chemistry of experience.
As Leonard Lee4 from Columbia Business School and his colleagues point out, evidence that food expectations affect perception is plentiful, whether it’s sliced turkey, seltzer water, beer, nutrition bars, coffee, strawberry yogurt, cheese spreads, or ice cream (Makens5, Nevid6, Allison and Uhl7, Wansink, Park, Sonka, and Morganosky8, Olson and Dover9, Wardle and Solomons10, Bowen, Tomoyasu, Anderson, Carney, and Kristal11).
Keith Reinhard, a member of the Advertising Hall of Fame and chairman emeritus of the marketing communications firm of DDB Worldwide, is fond of saying "Advertising is the last step in the manufacturing process." He means that the pleasure of consuming the product is due not only to the objective qualities built into the product in manufacturing, but also to the expectations attached to the product through marketing communication.
We can enhance our children’s pleasure in eating a vegetable dish by enhancing their expectation. We, of course, shouldn’t over-promise. But we can lead them to expect something of the pleasure we get by eating that dish. We can change their experience by changing their expectation.
Extended Stay America gave us a great example of what not to do. They believed that people want to feel at home at a hotel. So they created a commercial in which their guests felt so comfortable, so at home at Extended Stay America, that they felt free to pass gas whenever they wanted. The commercial modified experience with expectation, but probably not the modification Extended Stay America wanted. The ad led potential guests to expect they would get a room at Extended Stay America in which the previous guest was freely farting.
Westin Hotels, on the other hand, created the expectation of a hotel that is preferred by sophisticated travelers. Westin guests not only expected a better experience, they had a better experience because they tended to notice anything that a sophisticated traveler might like.
In most cases simple affect guides our expectations, preferences, and decisions. We go with what we like. Our mind tags representations of things (people, objects, actions), as Slovic, et al.12 would say, with a degree of positive or negative affect that summarizes the impressions we have of those things. In the future, we may not consciously recall the impression, but the affect, the liking, remains.
It doesn’t take much liking to steer our choices. It has been demonstrated that we feel mildly positively or negatively about certain cities, states, products, and technologies. Liking has a strong influence on preference even if we don’t know why we like what we like.
Slight differences in liking tend to become magnified. We seek out, notice, and pay attention to information that supports our current perspective. We pay little attention to evidence that contradicts our current perspective. This well-known bias is usually referred to as selective exposure. When information gets through our selective screen, we don’t treat it objectively. We interpret the information in a way that supports what we already believe. This is usually referred to as selective perception. People with different perspectives on the way things work can interpret the same data in two radically different ways. Almost any event in political news will be interpreted by liberals as supporting a liberal worldview and by conservatives as supporting a conservative worldview. Together, selective exposure and selective perception make up “confirmation bias.”13 We all exhibit confirmation bias, lay people and scientists alike.
If we feel a little more positively about a certain action, whether that action is voting for candidate A, not experimenting with drugs, buying fresh produce, or not having a cigarette, we seek out evidence that reinforces that feeling and ignore evidence that doesn’t. Confirmation bias doesn’t require much affect, just a hypothesis we are willing to entertain. If a fortune teller says that we will meet a handsome stranger, we notice evidence that might confirm that prediction and ignore evidence that might disconfirm it. Confirmation bias no doubt contributes to the rise and persistence of superstition and the success of soothsayers of all stripes and makes it very difficult for liberals and conservatives to agree on anything, no matter what the objective data.
Our affection persists and grows due to confirmation bias. Our affection for an action, however minor, sets our expectation. Our expectation heavily influences our experience of that action.
If we can improve, even slightly, the affection we feel for an action, we can improve our expectation, and improve the experience of the action. If we can improve, even slightly, the affection we feel for eating carrots, we can make carrots taste a little better. If we can improve, even slightly, the affection we feel for driving a Mustang, we can make driving that Mustang a little more thrilling.
And if we can improve, even slightly, the affection we feel for an action, that affection becomes self-supporting through confirmation bias. People will seek out, notice, and pay attention to information that reinforces that affection. Other information is likely to be ignored.
How, then, do we increase affection? How do we make people a little fonder of the action we suggest?
Increasing affection is not as difficult as it may seem. Mere exposure can do it.
A long list of experiments demonstrates that repeated exposure to a stimulus increases our affection and preference for it.14 The studies have shown that this happens with nonsense phrases, human faces, Chinese ideographs, and other visual stimuli. And it’s not just visual stimuli. Repeated exposure reliably increases affection for sounds, tastes, abstract ideas, and social stimuli. The mere exposure effect even works in nonhuman species.
We don’t need to pay attention. The stimulus needs no reinforcement. The exposure can be so subtle that we don’t even realize that it occurred. Exposure to a stimulus, even without attention and reinforcement, increases our affection and preference for it.
Exposure works because the exposed stimulus becomes more mentally available to us. The lizard inside, our automatic system, is most influenced by, pays the most attention to, assumes the importance of, and has the most confidence in things and people that come most easily to mind.
In marketing, frequency of exposure and exposure relative to competing brands lead to brand awareness. Brand awareness is one measure of availability. And brand awareness has a powerful impact on choice.
Wayne Hoyer is Zale Centennial Fellow in retail merchandising and associate professor of marketing, University of Texas at Austin. Hoyer and Steven Brown15 showed that when inexperienced consumers faced an unfamiliar brand choice task, brand awareness had a dramatic effect. Further, when given the opportunity to sample the products, consumers aware of one brand sampled fewer brands. Lastly, when aware of one brand in a choice set, consumers tended to choose the known brand even when it was of lower quality.
For the consumer, testing alternative brands is usually not feasible—impossible before purchase and difficult after purchase. Even in cases where the consumer can test competing brands, the results are often ambiguous because competing brands attempt to match each other on quality.
John Deighton is professor of business administration at Harvard Business School. Deighton suggests that when product testing is in-feasible or ambiguous, consumers will withhold final judgment until trying the product.16 But, he says, that consumer trial will not be a true product test. Rather, the small nudge of advertising and brand awareness combined with confirmation bias will affect how consumers conduct the test and how consumers interpret the experience, and will reinforce the small preference consumers had for the more familiar brand. This is exactly what Stephen Hoch and Young-Won Ha (University of Chicago’s Graduate School of Business, Center of Decision Research) found.17
We can enhance the expectation of what it would be like to take the action we suggest, whether it’s recycling an aluminum can or stopping smoking by increasing slightly our affection for that action. Mere exposure to the idea of that action can increase affection for it by making that action more available—that is, making that action come to mind more easily.
We can also enhance the expectation of what it would be like to take the action we suggest by improving the associations that come with that action. If our target wants to reduce the cost of government, and we are able to increase the association of recycling aluminum cans with lower cost of government through lower cost of garbage collection, we enhance the expectation. Imagine two situations in which the action of recycling aluminum cans is equally available. Imagine further that in the first situation, recycling is associated with lower cost of garbage collection and that association doesn’t occur in the second situation. Chances of persuasion success in the first situation are much better.
When we can make the desired action come more easily to mind, we actually improve the experience by enhancing the expectation. When we go beyond availability and associate the desired action with attributes, feelings, or images that are rewarding to the target, we enhance the expectation and improve the experience even more.
With time, Marlboro cigarettes created two very different expectations of what it would be like to smoke a Marlboro.18 These two different expectations resulted in two quite different experiences.
From the time of Queen Victoria until the 1950s, Phillip Morris positioned Marlboro as a women’s cigarette using advertising lines such as “Marlboro—Mild as May.” To enhance this position, Phillip Morris introduced an ivory-tipped version of Marlboro designed to stop bits of paper from sticking to the smoker’s lips and later a red tipped version designed to hide lipstick smears. By the mid-1950s, Marlboro held only one quarter of 1 percent of the total domestic market.
In 1955, Phillip Morris reintroduced Marlboro as a filter cigarette with a new, now familiar, logo, a “flip-top” box, and a new positioning. No longer a women’s cigarette, Phillip Morris sold Marlboro as a flavorful cigarette for ruggedly independent men. The ads associated Marlboro with manly users such as drill sergeants, construction workers, sailors, and, of course, cowboys, each holding the cigarette in a tattooed hand. In 1963, Marlboro fully committed to cowboys with theme music from the movie, The Magnificent Seven, western landscapes, and cowboy paraphernalia. The positioning and advertising have changed little since.
By the mid-1980s, Marlboro was the largest-selling cigarette brand in the world.
Before 1955, the experience of Marlboro was feminine. After 1955, the experience of Marlboro was masculine. The change in expectation changed the experience. Marlboro began behaving very differently. The actions of the brand overwhelmed former perceptions and led to the expectation of a masculine experience. The motive of the brand’s behavior change was profit. But people drew inferences from the masculine behavior of Marlboro and ignored the circumstances that led to the behavior. For the lizard, you are what you do no matter why you do it.
Perception is an unconscious process carried out by the lizard inside, our automatic mental system. Expectation guides perception.
Don’t wait. People’s expectations will alter their experience. It is possible, but difficult, to change people’s memory of an experience. It’s easier to change up-front expectations and those, in turn, change the experience itself.
Before people do what you would like them to do, focus them on the positive qualities of the experience.
As we know, wine salesmen prepare people for the taste of a sip of wine. If left to their own devices, how many people would pick up on the nutty bouquet or hint of raspberry?
Parents’ anticipation of and reaction to different foods change their children’s experience and set their children’s preferences. If you like the smell and taste of asparagus, let your children see your anticipation and reaction, and you improve the chances they will come to like asparagus.
You can make your partner’s first experience with your extended family at Thanksgiving more pleasant by making him or her sensitive in advance to the amusing quirks and interesting aspects of the characters. If your partner senses dread on your part, he or she is in for a long evening.
You can completely change the outcome of a test drive by leading the driver to anticipate the positive aspects of the acceleration, braking, handling, and road feel. If you don’t set the expectation beforehand, there is a good chance the driver will miss key selling points.
Of course, if you are selling a product, you owe it to your prospective customers to create positive expectations. Positive expectations are a big part of what customers are buying.
Naturally, it would be counterproductive to lead your target to anticipate outcomes that are factually inaccurate. Expecting 25 people to show up at a party when only 10 show up, or expecting acceleration from 0 to 60 in eight seconds when it takes 20 seconds, won’t enhance the experience. But you can modify the interpretation of experience. The fun of the party is subjective not objective, and expecting fun is likely to make the experience more pleasant. The exhilaration one gets from acceleration is subjective, an internal interpretation of experience. The exhilaration the driver feels depends, in part, on how you set the driver’s expectation.
When you set expectations, don’t stop with the sensory. Go beyond senses to feelings. How will it feel to get good grades? How will it feel to order a Budweiser? How will it feel to not eat that piece of cake? Feelings are completely subjective, heavily dependent on expectation, and highly motivating.
Setting expectation has a long-term impact. It is persuasion with legs. Because expectation changes experience, your target may not only take your recommended option now, but is likely to choose it again and again.
We can change experience by changing expectation. We can make carrots taste a little better.