Trust and Advertising Blind Spots in Consumer Attention

The psychological tricks advertisers use to hack the consumer’s mind have remained much the same over the years. It’s been clear since the dawn of advertising that familiarity breeds trust.
 

In Germany, their names were Klementine, Antje, Tilly, Karin, Dr. Best and Herr Kaiser, and they were virtual members of the family, on a par with aunts and uncles. Actually, many of us saw them in our living rooms more regularly than our closest relatives. Always on prime-time television in the evening, touting detergents, Dutch cheese, coffee brands, life insurance and, subliminally, a whole world view. The female advertising icons among them, with their likeable can-do housewife look, puffed their products in the “natural” domestic setting of the traditional happy homemaker. They were clearly intended to come across as old familiars with whom we were on a first-name basis. The men, on the other hand, went by their surnames: You have to google Dr. Best – the fellow in the white lab coat who pressed the flexible toothbrush into the tomato to demonstrate how soft it would be on your gums – to find out that he was in fact a real-life American dentist whose real name was Earl James Best. This is what the early trust-building ads looked like for most baby boomers. And they worked.

Madge puffed washing-up liquid in the US

Partly thanks to easy adaptability to cultural differences. The German Tilly (“Are you soaking your hands in washing-up liquid?” – “No, in Palmolive!”), for instance, was known as Madge in the US and Canada, Marisa in Denmark and Françoise in France. Familiarity, as advertisers knew from the get-go, breeds trust. Once that familiarity has been established, a “monopoly position in the consumers’ psyche” is almost sure to follow. This is how the German graphic artist and psychologist Hans Domizlaff described the goal of “Markentechnik” (“brand technique”) way back in the 1930s.         

And even if German admen and adwomen now employ English terms like “branding” and “brand trust” rather than “Markenvertrauen”, the tools they use to hack into the human mind have hardly changed at all over the years. Basically, they target blind spots in our attention, the technical term for which is “cognitive bias”. One such method is known as the “illusory truth effect”: What we hear or see repeatedly comes to seem familiar and therefore correct and true simply because we’ve heard or seen it so often. This goes for everything from car commercials to Donald Trump and multiple-choice tests, on which we’re liable to tick the same wrong answer we chose the last time simply because it looks so damned familiar.

White coats lend authority

And then there’s the “authority bias”: We tend to believe authority figures – or people we take for authority figures. And we’re all the more inclined to believe them if they’re convincingly fitted out with the insignia of experts. Hence the use of men or women in white coats for dental care ads, and in workman’s overalls to advertise cars and household appliances.

“In-group bias” also comes in handy. It’s based on the need to belong to a certain exclusive group. We’re tempted to buy the capsules promoted by George Clooney just to feel as though we were drinking coffee with him. Or the briefs sported by Cristiano Ronaldo to get that “we-wear-the-same-underwear” feeling of inner kinship with the famous footballer. Naturally, a whole host of influencers have been surfing the in-group wave for some time now, including Safiya Nygaard, one of the world’s highest-paid social media stars.

Hoping the pixie dust of coolness will rub off

The American beauty influencer with Indian and Danish roots has nearly ten million subscribers to her YouTube series Bad Beauty Science and earns close to €200,000 per post. The marketing calculus driving her success is that when followers buy the products she endorses, some of the pixie dust of her coolness will rub off on them. However, social media is a case in point that advertising sometimes becomes a victim of its own weapons. Consumers apparently prefer advertising that has accompanied them for the longest time in their lives, in other words the most familiar ads. According to a recent worldwide survey, for which the Nielsen market research company polled over 43,000 people in 56 countries, the vast majority of consumers find newspaper, television and radio advertising far more trustworthy than ads by influencers.

Potemkin villages of trust

But consumers (89 per cent of the respondents) have the most faith in personal recommendations by family, friends and acquaintances. This is probably because our disappointment is likely to be all the more bitter if we get a “bum steer” from those close to us, people we’re supposed to trust implicitly, especially when it comes to promises. The 2015 Volkswagen emissions scandal (“Dieselgate”) and the financial crisis in 2008 caused a disillusionment not unlike the rude awakening after falling for a love scammer and realizing our mistake. And the bigger the Potemkin villages of trust he has built up to gain our trust, the more shocking his cold-hearted designs will seem. Once the façades have fallen, once the currency of trust has begun to plummet, rebuilding that trust will cost a disproportionate expense of time, energy and money on renewed efforts at persuasion. At times like these, consumers hanker after the halcyon days of Tilly, Madge, Marisa or Françoise, back when everything was better – even the advertising. Only to end up falling for yet another cognitive bias: rosy retrospection.