Well have you ever thought about how we choose our credit cards? Do we choose our credit cards like other personal objects or are we influenced by anything while making a selection of a particular credit card?
Most of the people really think that marketing methods do not affect their decision making.
Because we want to see ourselves as rational people rather than emotional ones and we want to prove that we make wise and calculated choices over what we buy. But in actual this is not the case.
Many researchers have been calculating the extent of marketing affects of people’s decisions. A recent study done by Baylor College of Medicine was reported on the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s ScienceNetLinks website. In this study, the researchers used Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scanners to detect the brain’s activity when people were drinking coke and Pepsi.
On giving the unidentified drinks, the brain pleasure was stimulated but when they thought they were drinking their favorite coke, the brain activity increased to 70% but those people who were drinking Pepsi received only 25% brain stimulation. This turns out quite odd and the possible explanation is given by Andy Goldsmith:
Ask people about Coke imagery and they’re likely to come up with Mean Joe Greene, Polar Bears, and a slew of other iconic imagery. Ask people about Pepsi, and the imagery isn’t quite as deeply rooted – they might associate Pepsi with a hot celebrity or with “young generation” appeal, but they probably don’t link it to the kind of emotional American icons Coke has successfully linked to.
This means that marketing strategies affect the brain without our conscious effort. The definition of brand is basically an emotional attachment and nothing more which creates the acceptance to buy a product or service again and again for a long period of time at any price.
This can also apply to the credit card companies in the same way. Most if buy their credit cards who offer them with great services yet the name of the company doesn’t mean anything to them. They don’t have any attachment with the credit card company. The only exception is American Express for which customers are more than delighted to spend extra annual fee for keeping the prestigious card, which is probably because of the old ad which used to say,
American Express says more about you than cash ever can.
The reason why American Express emotionally attaches people is because it hires world’s best marketers to perform the branding task to influence its customers.
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- [July 29, 2011] Discover Website Ranked Top For Customer Experience
