Thinking without Thinking

An article in Marketing Today Daryl Travis assesses Malcolm Gladwell's book Blink.  Gladwell's book suggests that all consumers "think without thinking."

Gladwell's arguments are very similar to the concepts that are covered in our Marketing Express Textbook.  That people make decisions about products before they even think about it.  Gladwell says that we go through two processes.
1)Rapid Cognition: Rapid thought that happens outside of conscious awareness, commonly called intuition: The act or process of coming to direct knowledge or certainty without reasoning or inferring.
2)Thin-Slicing: The ability of our unconscious to find patterns in situations and behavior based on very narrow slices of experience.

Gladwell believes that these two processes make it difficult to actually answer honestly about why we like or do not like something.  Gladwell says, "while people are very willing and very good at volunteering information explaining their actions, those explanations, particularly when it comes to the kinds of spontaneous opinions and decisions that arise out of the unconscious, aren’t necessarily correct. Finding out what people think of a rock song sounds as if it should be easy. But the truth is that it isn’t, and the people who run focus groups and opinion polls haven’t always been sensitive to this fact."

Have you ever experienced a smell, sound, or image that caused a different image to show up in your mind?  For my entire childhood the word "stupid" always triggered a weird image in my mind of an Indian Chief sitting on a basketball court.  Obviously, this image has nothing to do with that word.  If anything, the feeling the image gave me was fear, and perhaps the image was a reaction of knowing that it was a "bad word" but who knows?  The mind thinks in a series of subconscious images that are linked to our emotions, and this is something that marketers need to take into consideration.

Daryl Travis is the CEO of Bandtrust, and discusses how his company goes about "finding the blink."

They do emotional research to find out what elements create a "blink" experience.  They discover specific triggers that draw out the "blink" experience like: familiar sounds, aromas of your favorite food, or a lost loved one.  According to the article they also "...explore the deeper feelings of the emotion and how they invoke behaviors that make up the landscape of all of our psychological experiences. Revealing these emotional responses, common to most people, provides the insights into what a brand must say and do to succeed."

Can you think of something (word, phrase, image) that triggers an image or an emotion for you?

Has a product (that you can consciously think of) ever triggered good or bad emotion for you?