Memory and Nostalgia

“Every time an advertisement or commercial appears, the objective is to have the reader or viewer learn something …. and remember what he learned “ (Britt 1955)

“ …. our ultimate aim is to teach them brand loyalty” (Rice 1997)


All this memory and nostalgia takes me back to A-level Psychology, all the different theories and experiments give very valid reasons to association with brands.

There a re basically two types of conditioning; classical and operant

One of the most well known experiments relating to classical conditioning and my personal favourite is Pavlov and his dogs!

He trained dogs by association with sound. Every time he rang a bell he would give the dogs food, by giving them food they would salivate. After doing this Pavlov would ring the bell which made the dogs salivate and they would associate the bell with food.

This can be applied to modern world very easily. A nice watch or designer clothing makes you associate wealth with that individual, or over exposure of a condition response such as Burberry in the past could make you associate it with Chavs and its cheap, when it its certainly not.



On the other hand we have Operant conditioning, this is a technique of behavior modification through positive and negative reinforcement and positive and negative punishment.



This form of operant conditioning worked very well with me when I was young, If I saw something I wanted I would behave well for my mum and dad so that I could get it. Such as a new YoYo or Pokemon cards!

A more recent form of operant conditioning would be the supermarkets, Sainsbury's for example give vouchers and money off coupons for customers on their next purchase, they get rewarded for buying products. This does not only work with supermarkets, but clothes stores are at it and restaurants also! There just seems to be one massive sale on every bloody day of the week!

Conditional responses to products is very important for the business to progress. Every time I look at Nike I people who wear them as winners or champions.These conditioned responses help build the Brand equity,this equity involves:

Brand name awareness
Brand loyalty
Perceived brand quality
Brand Associations

MEMORY!!

I'm doing this one as split blog as I think both Memory and Nostalgia are very alike and both are heavily entwined.

“learning is the acquisition of knowledge & memory is the storage of internal representations of that knowledge” (Blakemore, 1988)

From what I remember at A-level.....

We take in thousands and thousands of things a day especially brands, however if we were to store all of that it would be impossible sooooooo......we filter out what we need to remember or want to remember, we take in the information process it then store it in long term memory for future retrieval.

Short term memory only last 18 seconds and we can remember 7 characters, so we need brands or ads to shock us make us remember them.

Marketers can use memory as one of their most effective tools in the trade, if they can use smells or old songs in TV programs to relate to the customer they may win them over due to them remembering 'the good old days'. When I'm older I think Ill remember this (and many more)....





NOSTALGIA!

When a stimulus is capable of recreating a personal event, even after many years, there often follows a bitter-sweet sentiment known as nostalgia” (Dubois, 2000)

Sound - Bit of 80's tunes for the mum and dad
Image - The best mullets of the time
Smell - Old spice was all the rave
Taste - A cheeky cider or a pie at the local rugby game

The good old days as the 'rents' would say!

A connection between customer and product is known as sensory branding. The more senses a brand appeals to the stronger the message will be received.