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In the year of the US Presidential election, a controversial contender’s re-election campaign highlights the close relationship between politics, marketing and research.
Here’s the story.
Despite all expectations, and to widespread horror and condemnation from his opponents, a media personality-turned politician gets elected to the US Presidency. And then, a few years later, he stands for re-election. But in the meantime things have changed. There’s an assassination attempt. And there are other things going on beneath the surface. Things that will turn out to have a huge impact both on the result of the election, and on the marketing, branding and communications industries.
I’m talking, of course, about Ronald Reagan, the sometime TV sports commentator, sometime Hollywood cowboy, who twice became US President. The lessons of his re-election matter for all of us.
Controversial candidate: Ronald Reagan
Reagan won his first Presidency in 1980. That time round he was standing against the incumbent, the former peanut-farmer Jimmy Carter. Back then, planning a political campaign was all about the message. It was about what you told people, and what they thought about it. How you found out what people thought about your message was by asking them, which you did through focus groups and quantitative surveys.
But around that time, things were happening in academia that were poised to have a seismic impact on all this.
At the University of British Columbia, a 46-year-old professor by the name of Daniel Kahnemann was working with 43-year-old Amos Tversky and 35-year-old Richard Thaler to produce a body of work that would fundamentally change our understanding of human decision-making.
On 1st March 1980, eight months before the Reagan v. Carter election, Thaler published a paper titled Toward a Positive Theory of Consumer Choice[1] . Kahneman subsequently called the paper “the founding text of behavioural economics.”
At the time it went largely unnoticed outside a small circle of academics. It’s unlikely that Ronald Reagan or his campaign team ever saw it or were even aware of its existence. But over the years that followed, the ideas contained in that paper began to spread and gain traction. In particular, it proposed that human decision-making is driven by processes that are both predictable and yet at the same time inconsistent with logic and economic theory. As for what those processes are, Kahnemann’s contribution was to dig deeper into the role of instinct and emotion to arrive at the realisation that how we feel about a choice is far more important than what we think about it, and that what we think we think is often a post-rationalisation of how we feel.
Four years and one assassination attempt later, Ronald Reagan stood for re-election. But this time round his people were beginning to understand the importance of the advances in behavioural science. When Reagan’s team set out to research the potential impact of campaign messages on different voter groups, they brought in the early versions of an emotion-tracking technology known as the dial-test [2].
Essentially, participants were given a box with a dial on it and put in a room with a screen, where they were asked to watch a campaign message. As they watched, they were instructed to turn the dial to the right whenever they were feeling good, and to turn it to the left if they were feeling bored or bad. Early versions of the box contained a slowly-rotating reel of paper with a pencil attached to a spring-loaded lever. Later versions were electronic. The output, in either case, was a trace that showed, in real time, how respondents were reacting on an emotional level, to what they were seeing.
The research helped Reagan’s campaign team hone and fine-tune their messaging, and on November 6, 1984, their candidate was re-elected by a landslide, carrying 49 of 50 states.
The dial-test was just one of a growing range of other non-verbal emotion-tracking tests developed around that time. Other technologies included brain wave scanners, galvanic skin response, voice pitch analysis and eye-tracking. There was some interest from a number of big players in marketing, although for some years that interest remained somewhat niche and never really followed through into wide-scale adoption across the industry. Partly this was because of the costs involved. Partly, also, there was a sense that when it came to steering commercial creativity the findings tended to be dry, abstract and academic rather than practical and actionable.
Increasingly, however, that looks set to change. This is due to the rise of neuroaesthetics, an emerging discipline within the field of cognitive neuroscience that focuses specifically on the biological basis of how our brains respond to creativity. That creativity may take the form of a Beethoven symphony, or the sight of the Mona Lisa. Or it may take the form of the latest campaign for Coca Cola or Adidas.
The rise of neuroaesthetics has been accelerated by improvements in brain-scanning technology and the rise of AI to analyse and model the vast quantities of data produced by the use of EEG headsets and other brain monitoring technologies to ‘read’ people’s emotions when exposed to advertising.
It’s already been embraced by brands like ITV, Bentley and Nike.
Rather than just a line trace, neuroaesthetic technologies create a map of swirling colours on a computer screen. Researchers see grey swirls where people are bored; blue where they’re sad; green where they’re relaxed and contented; red where they’re angry; and yellow where they are joyful.
More than ever before, it’s like actually seeing what’s going on inside people’s heads.
As with many new research technologies, the initial costs and complexities of neuroaesthetic research were high in the early days. Just putting the headset on is a specialist task involving precise placement 64 or more gel electrodes.
However, as the technology advances those look set to be rapidly surmounted. Speaking to The Times [3] Neuroscientist Erica Warp, head of labs at neuroaesthetic research company Kinda Studios, says, “Soon, EEG sensors will be built into your glasses, and we won’t need the headset.”
When that happens, it will increasingly be within the scope, and within the budgets, of more and more clients and their agencies. This will give marketers the ability not just to record how consumers say what they’re feeling – which may differ from what they’re actually feeling – but to see it for themselves. And that will make a difference.
Already, in June this year, Kinda Studios has worked with adam&eveDDB, to develop an advert for Twix. Client company Mars claims the technology can predict whether adverts are likely to lead to a sale with 85% accuracy.
It’s all a very long way, in one sense, from panels of 1980s voters sitting listening to Ronald Reagan speeches with a mechanical dial scratching lines onto a roll of graph-paper. But in another sense, it’s a direct evolution of the 1980s behavioural science that has revolutionised our understanding of human decision-making over the course of the past generation, and that continues to do so at an ever-greater pace, turbocharged by the power of AI.
What this all means for a certain other modern-day candidate’s election prospects still remains to be seen.
But it doesn’t take a very stable [4] genius to work out that the new research methodologies are going to have very significant implications for your brand and its marketing.
[2]https://www.dialsmith.com/blog/what-is-dial-testing/
First published by Warc.com on 2 October 2024.