Abstract
Advertising is a human construct that has been created since the dawn of man. Digging down to the root of the definition, advertising is a form of persuasion, so technically we advertise without even thinking. However, when it comes down to a company, more thought is put into play towards how said company will advertise their product. In fact, most companies have entire teams dedicated towards marketing. While these teams try their best to think of the next best way to advertise, 100% of the successful ones have something in common, they all play around with the emotion of the consumer. Human’s act and think on emotion, an aspect that was caught by the Hooked Model. The Hooked Model leads the consumers emotion into a series of steps where they will ultimately land in the hands of the company. To explore this model further, I decided to choose two companies, Apple and Sony, and one commercial from each, in an attempt to explore the way these commercials used elements of the hooked model in addition to how emotion is used against the consumer. Long story short, the companies were successful in doing so.
Introduction
Companies, big and small, use advertising in an attempt to convince the consumer that they need their product. In layman terms, advertising is to persuade someone, so even we advertise. For example, has a friend ever offered you a cup of coffee? If so, technically, they were advertising their friendship. Examples like these are everywhere but I assume my point is taken.
Most companies use emotion to their advantage to get their point across. They get into the mind of their consumer and pull/play around with strings in the consumer’s mind. It is important to note that humans are social creatures, our brains evolved to handle these social behaviors, so it is no surprise that we run on emotion. Companies try to sell an emotion/feeling by tying said emotion/feeling to their product.
Materials and Methods
It would be foolish to assume that I can dive directly into each and every advertisement in the world, so for the sake of being brief I have chosen two companies to focus on, Apple and Sony. Along with these companies, I will also take into consideration as to how well they use the elements of the hooked model.
Hooked Model
“Habit-forming products change user behavior and create unprompted user engagement. The aim is to influence customers to use your product on their own, again and again, without relying on overt calls-to-action such as ads or promotions.”(Eyir,Neil 15) The hooked model consist of four elements:
Triggers: Triggers grab the consumers attention by evoking an emotion/feeling and associating said emotion/feeling towards the product. Triggers come in either internal or external. Internal triggers consist of everything in the consumers uncontrollable mental desires while external consist of outside forms of advertising (i.e. the image of the product).
Action: The satisfaction the consumer gets with using and interacting with a company’s product will ensure that the consumer will come for more.
Variable Reward: A product with a predictable reward is not one that consumers will find interesting. As Hook: How to Build Habit Forming Products puts it, “Feedback loops are all around us, but predictable ones don’t create desire.”(Eyir,Neil 10) Essentially, a great reward will be one that the consumer does not expect.
Investment: The amount of time and effort the consumer puts into the product to make it enjoyable the next time they use said product.
Apple & Sony
The two commercials that would be used is “1984” (Apple Inc., Scott Ridly.) and the “Sony Walkman Monkey Commercial” (Sony.)
Results
Taking the elements of the hooked model into consideration, I conducted how powerful each ad is and how it correlates with the model. Most importantly, I wanted to see how exactly the ads play on emotions.
Apple’s “1984” ad
Apple’s “1984” ad plays on the original “1984” by George Orwell. The ad starts off with people sitting down to listen to big brother, as was in the original book. However, unlike the original book, we see a lady with a Macintosh shirt, running away from guards while carrying a sledge hammer to throw at the big brother screen. This action follows with a series of text that is summed up by, “Why 1984 won’t be like 1984” (Apple Inc. Scott Ridley.) If not obvious to some, this ad uses the consumers fear, which is the trigger, to its advantage, as this was a time where people did not trust computers. This ad used fear along with propagating off IBM. Apple was essentially saying to the people that feared computers, if you continue to support IBM, your fear is justified, but if you hop on the Apple ship, you would be safe. As explained in Hooked: How to Build Habit Forming Products, in psychology, humans tend to interact with something more when a negative emotion is brought up, so using fear as a trigger was smart of Apple. Additionally, the trigger got people interested to see The Macintosh. The Macintosh, when sold, shattered even Steve Jobs estimates, “He predicted that Apple would sell 50,000 Macs in its first 100 days after the introduction. Apple smashed that number by April 6. By May 3 — or day 100 — Apple had sold 72,000 Macs.” (Dormehl Luke, 2020.) The Macintosh will get praised due to its simplicity in UI and the mouse feature, which was the action. The satisfaction people got from the Macintosh due to its easy-to-use UI made, not only for someone to continue using it, but also led to more people recommending it.
Sony’s Walkman Monkey Commercial
The Sony Monkey Walkman commercial shows a monkey closing his eyes and facing the distant sun. Midway through the commercial it states, “Sound is evolving but what about mankind” implying that mankind has yet to catch up to Sony. The monkey sparks a humors emotion and gets our attention quickly and keeps our focused until the end of the commercial. The attention-grabbing nature of the commercial was key in most Sony Walkman commercials. While the commercial served as a trigger, when having the product, it is obvious why it was so popular. The satisfaction of being able to listen to music outside without having to carry a large boombox, a loud one at that, made consumers happy. It made people recommend the Walkman more, and additionally, the mixtapes people would make for each other served as a valuable reward for the product. The Walkman will sell huge as, “According to Sony’s latest figures, cumulative worldwide shipments of the cassette tape Walkman are 186 million units, 46 million units for the CD Walkman, and 4.6 million units for the MD Walkman (as of the end of the fiscal year 1998).”(Sony, 1999.)
Conclusion
Advertising is an important element in everyone’s everyday lives due to the heavy amount that we indulge ourselves in it. There are many examples of advertisements without our knowledge, such as how our phones have a logo for the companies in the back. Due to this heavy involvement that it has in our lives, it is important to understand not only advertising itself but its affects as well. Questions that we should ask ourselves are how exactly does advertising work, and why is it that it works like that? These are the same questions that teams at big companies ask themselves when trying to promote one of their products. In a sense, they work on trying to manipulate and play on the human mind, more specifically on the emotions. Many big companies understand the fact that humans are emotional creatures, and as such, react towards their emotions. Such an example of how a big company manipulates the users’ emotions through advertising are ones of Apple and Sony. Apple used the emotion fear to its advantage in their “1984” commercial to trigger the viewer to get their interest. In doing so, they implied their product as a solution to this negative emotion. Sony would not use any negative emotions in their Sony Walkman Monkey Commercial, however still used weird imagery to shock the viewers, which again is used as an excellent trigger. Both triggers that were used got the users in a loop, which led to the next three elements of the hooked model, action, variable reward, and investment. Once a consumer even indulges in the trigger to action response, they are officially attached to the product.
Resources
- Eyal, Nir, and Ryan Hoover. Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products. Illustrated, Portfolio, 2014.
- Vintage Fanatic. “Vintage Old 1980’s Sony Walkman Monkey Commercial.” YouTube, uploaded by Vintage Fanatic, 25 June 2013, www.youtube.com/watch?v=Za86WAx-lms.
- “Sony Global – Press Release – Sony Celebrates Walkman(R) 20th Anniversary.” Sony Global, 1 July 1999, www.sony.com/en/SonyInfo/News/Press_Archive/199907/99-059.
- Dormehl, Luke. “Today in Apple History: Mac’s First 100 Days Prove a Roaring Success.” Cult of Mac, 3 May 2020, www.cultofmac.com/479113/today-apple-history-first-100-days-mac-roaring-success.
- Scott, Ridley. “1984.” Commercial, uploaded by Apple, 31 Dec. 1984, www.youtube.com/watch?v=R706isyDrqI.
