Making Associations: How advertising takes advantage of a technique developed by psychologists
By Lucy Keyserling
Would you rather buy a car like a tiger, or one like a turtle? The answer is obvious – tigers are fast and aggressive, turtles slow and passive, so the tiger-like car has more appeal to us, because we want cars that are speedy, powerful and exciting. Makes of car like the Cougar (an animal similar to a panther) or the Mustang (a wild horse) have the names they do because marketing specialists believe it’s a way to attract buyers. Advertising tries to create positive associations around their products to influence the decisions consumers make. What is the psychology behind this? Making associations like this is not literal – we don’t think the car is really a tiger. Nor is it a conscious process – the images we see or words we hear can change our frame of mind, or affective state, in ways we don’t realize. This can then influence our decision-making.
In fact, when advertising specialists use surveys or focus groups to find out what associations people have, they are building on the work of some classic psychologists who wanted to investigate the unconscious mind. The most famous of these was Sigmund Freud, who developed a technique called free association to get at the deep neuroses and fixations of his psychoanalytic patients. However, two of Freud’s students, Hermann Rorschach and Karl Jung, also tackled the problem, coming up with variations on free association that shed light on how this process works in the mind.
In Freudian analysis, the patient talks to the doctor in hour-long sessions. At the beginning of the hour, Freud would often ask patients to say the first thing that popped into their minds – to free-associate – and then follow the trail of associations, which Freud believed would eventually lead to insights about issues that patients could not otherwise consciously access. Freud suspected that the mental problems of patients were often due to repression of painful memories. With free association, these memories would be revealed in an indirect way that didn’t threaten the patient’s self-image. This helped the doctor to understand the problem and work with the patient to overcome his secret fears and neuroses.
While Freud worked with words, Rorschach used pictures to stimulate free association. As a child, Rorschach enjoyed playing a Swiss children’s game that involved dripping ink onto a sheet of paper and then folding the paper so that the ink smudges produced a recognizable shape, like a flower, a bird, or a butterfly. With time, he got very good at it and was nicknamed Klecks, Swiss German for “inkblot.” Rorschach retained his fascination for inkblots well into adulthood, developing a set of images that worked as a visual variation on Freud’s verbal technique. The process is simple. Individuals look at Rorschach’s inkblots and tell researchers what they see. Different people see different things, and researchers analyze the significance of the different associations. The method makes use of the tendency of the human brain to find patterns in everything. Even when presented with images with few or no recognizable features, we still see patterns – animal shapes in cloud formations, human faces in Martian craters, and butterflies in inkblots.
Jung also devised a visual free-associative technique, “active imagination,” that involved mental pictures rather than inkblot images. Active imagination evolved from Jung’s work with dreams. He often asked patients to embellish a dream image or association through drama, dance, drawing, writing or talking. In this way, Jung believed, archetypes – innate, universal prototypes of human experience that are located in the collective unconscious – could be coaxed to the surface. “When we concentrate on an inner picture and when we are careful not to interrupt the natural flow of events,” he wrote, “our unconscious will produce a series of images which make a complete story.”
Freud, Rorschach and Jung all had a profound interest in the way the mind makes associations. As we have seen, each of these well-known psychologists developed a new technique to encourage free association. As therapists, they hoped to use free association to access the unconscious minds of their neurotic or mentally troubled patients. In this way, their problems could be brought to the surface and, when the patients could observe and understand them, perhaps resolved. Marketing specialists also want to access the unconscious, but in order to create attractive brand images that result in better sales. In this light, it might be a good thing if we all knew more about how we make associations. If we understood our own unconscious minds better, we might be more at peace with ourselves. In any case, we would be less easily swayed by persuasive images in the advertising that bombards us daily from TV and other sources.