There is a traditional model of emotion and behavior that says conscious emotion is a direct cause of behavior. This model has dominated thinking about emotion at least since the days of the ancient Greeks. At first glance, it seems to make perfect sense. Don’t emotions make us act? If we get angry, we attack our foe. If we experience fear, we freeze or run away. If we feel love, we want to embrace our beloved. But a closer examination reveals flaws in this simple characterization.

Direct emotional causation of behavior certainly makes sense for animals that lack the sophisticated…

by Steve Genco, Kimberly Rose Clark, and Matthew Tullman

In 1982, First Lady Nancy Reagan visited the Longfellow Elementary School in Oakland California. When a schoolgirl asked her what she should do if she were offered drugs, the First Lady replied, “Just say no.” With those three words, one of the most ubiquitous Public Service Announcement (PSA) campaigns in modern American marketing was born. It was also one of the first truly multi-platform campaigns, encompassing TV and radio ads, op-ed pieces in major newspapers, dozens of appearances by Nancy Reagan on talk shows, cameos on popular TV sitcoms, and even…

The opposing attractions of novelty and familiarity, which seem to tug marketing strategies and practices in two opposite directions, have perplexed marketers since the first marketing messages were crafted.¹

When presented as a dichotomy, there is no obvious answer, because good evidence can be cited on both sides of the argument. I believe a more promising approach is to view novelty and familiarity not as a dichotomy, but as a continuum. This continuum is the path along which a consumer travels with regard to any product or brand. …

Robert Zajonc first published his findings on the mere exposure effect in 1968. In an article titled “Attitudinal Effects of Mere Exposure,” he described a series of experimental findings that fundamentally challenged the psychological understanding of preferences accepted at the time. According to that understanding, preferences were a result of conscious thinking. Cognitions were believed to come first, in the form of information processing, evaluation, and inferences about a perceived object. Attitudes, in the form of likes, dislikes, and preferences among alternatives were believed to form only later, based on those prior cognitive processes. …

Recently I’ve been writing in Medium about marketing and persuasion, mostly thru the excellent publication Better Marketing. It is with some reluctance that I venture into the poisoned waters of American politics, but I believe we need to acknowledge that the United States can no longer tolerate a political party that has devolved into an organized hate group dedicated to overthrowing our American democracy and replacing it with a poorly thought-out plutocracy based on minority rule, voter suppression, racism, foreign collusion, and a shredding of our Constitution.

All around us today we are see a reawakening of American conscience and…

Beginning with the pathbreaking work of Kahneman and Tversky, behavioral economists have identified many practical implications of cognitive heuristics and biases for directly or covertly influencing consumer choice and behavior.

Two paths, contradictory in their goals but similar in their methods, have emerged in recent years. The first, which might be called the consumer well-being path, focuses on the idea that behavioral designs can be used to help people make better choices. As summarized by behavioral economist Dan Ariely, the purpose of this approach is to develop “behavioral interventions that help people be happier, healthier, and wealthier.”² …

In a recent article promoting my book, Intuitive Marketing, I outlined some common mistakes marketers make when they try too hard to persuade consumers to buy their products and brands. That advice was necessarily negative — it described what not to do. Now I’d like to consider the opposite question: what are some positive ways marketers can influence consumers constructively, beyond simply avoiding traditional marketing mistakes?

Here is five intuitive marketing principles that marketers can begin applying today to build relationships with consumers that do not disrupt and annoy, but identify and align with the deeper wants, needs, and goals…

People’s automatic responses to repetitive exposure and processing fluency may create what appears to marketers to be stable and reliable preferences. But brain science researchers have found that human preferences are often much more temporary and much more easily manipulated than consumers’ sincere declarations of brand love might lead marketers to believe.

This is an area where traditional marketing theory has been led astray by the classic economic model of rational choice, which predicts behavior based on assumptions that preferences are stable, consistent, known before choices are made, and known with adequate precision to make the process of choosing among…