It is no secret that travelling through Istanbul during rush-hour can be quite a challenge and sometimes I welcome a little escapism in form of listening to my mp3-player. The other day, I was listening to a podcast by Dan Ariely (you know these sort of radio programmes you can download from the internet) when I was walking through Beşiktaş in Istanbul. Dan Ariely is a US-based professor in Behavioural Economics and mostly interested in how people make decisions. He published many articles and also several books on the subject, including the very successful ‘Predictably Irrational’. He also runs a very informal interview series in podcast format called ‘Arming the donkeys’. In the podcast I was listening to he interviewed Laurie Santos, a psychologist from Yale University, USA. She is well-known in psychology circles for her research on how monkeys make decisions (and as far as I know no monkey is harmed in the experiments, although you may still object to monkeys being used for research at all).
In her and her colleagues’ latest study, so she explained, they tested if advertising influences food choices of monkeys. The monkeys were trained to buy their meals with a token. The meal always consisted of the same cereal but the monkeys had the option to buy it with a token from two different ‘vendors’. One of the researchers dressed as ‘vendors’ wore an outfit similar in design to the uniforms people working at one of the best-known fast-food chains wear (yes, it was McDonalds). The other wore an outfit similar to the one worn in another well-known fast-food chain (yes, it was Burger King). At this stage the monkeys did not care too much about the outfit of the ‘vendors’ as the meal they could get from each one was the same anyway. But now the interesting part: For a period of two weeks the monkeys were divided into two groups. Group one was shown a poster advertising food using the design by McDonalds. Group two was exposed to advertising by Burger King. The ‘vendors’ were unaware what kind of advertising the monkeys had seen in order to prevent that a change in the ‘vendors’’ behaviour would influence the outcome. And the result? The monkeys who had seen McDonald adverts tended to buy more meals from the ‘vendor’ in the McDonald outfit and the monkeys who had seen Burger King adverts tended to buy more from the ‘vendor’ in the Burger King outfit. This clearly showed that advertising had had an effect on the monkeys even though the effect was smaller than a drastic price change such as two meals for one token. Without doubt, sophisticated advertising slogans don’t work on monkeys, so another mechanism must be effective. Together with other research these results support the idea that the monkeys’ buying decisions, but also our own buying choices, are more influenced by being familiar with a brand and a product than by slogans praising its advantages and benefits. This means that it does not matter so much if you pay attention to the advertising slogans or not. Just being exposed to the company’s logo or the product picture seems to do the (advertising) trick. Now, if you ever (dare to) watch Turkish television you can see that advertisers in Turkey have understood well that endlessly repeated exposure to products and brands pays off.
As I was walking through Beşiktaş and listening to that podcast I also noticed a poster advertising a music festival which was named after the brand name of a famous Turkish beer. In many countries we have had to get used to football leagues, concerts and even whole buildings being given the name of the company who is an important sponsor or of one of their products. This is clever marketing because what better way to ensure that we costumers are constantly exposed to the brand or product name? You may say that advertising has an important role and that many cultural and sporting events would have to be cancelled without commercial sponsorship. This may be so, but the music festival advertised for on the poster bears the name of a beer. Some years ago, when I was visiting Istanbul merely for holidays, people seemed to drink alcohol in parks and along the sea-side only with cans or bottles being thoroughly hidden in paper bags or wrapped in newspaper, at least during the day. A walk through Kadiköy today confirmed that this is not the case anymore, as I saw quite a few people drinking beer outside quite openly in the early afternoon. Turkey is trying to combat one of the main health problem: smoking. However, Turkey should also be aware that having cultural events named after alcoholic drinks has the potential to contribute to an increase in alcohol consumption. In the UK, where many music festivals and other cultural events are named after alcoholic drinks, total healthcare costs related to alcohol misuse are about £1.6 billion (about $2.37 billion) and up to 35 per cent of all accident and emergency (A&E) attendance and ambulance costs may be alcohol-related (source: Institute of Alcohol Studies, UK). In Turkey, treatment centres for alcohol addiction certainly have no shortage of patients. Some people will choose to smoke, some will choose to drink and a free society must allow individual choices. However, let’s be aware that these ‘choices’ are not completely depended on rationality and ‘free-will’. Just like the monkeys we are influenced by advertising through some very basic psychological mechanisms. Just like monkeys we tend to follow the rule: Monkey see, monkey buy.
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