A brief excursion into the human head: the brain of an adult weighs 1,300 to 1,400 grams. Yet it has an estimated 100 billion nerve cells – called neurons – each of which has about 10,000 connections to other neurons. This ensures that the human being can send, receive and forward signals non-stop. Every second, we take in eleven million bits or 1.4 megabytes of information through our eyes, ears, nose, mouth and skin – an enormous amount (a single-digit number like 3 means five bits).
But we do not consciously process this amount. Consciously, it’s only between 40 and 50 bits. That corresponds to an eight-digit number, a telephone number, for example.
And now to advertising: Even if advertising – in pictures, as text or music – has an effect on a human brain, consciously only about 40 bits arrive. That is very little. Nevertheless, just under eleven million bits do not fizzle out without effect.
The power of the brain
Christian Schreier and Dirk Held explain how and why this is so in their book “How Advertising Works”. Efficiency is the magic word. The brain works efficiently when, for example, a judgment is made in seconds about a stranger – stereotypes and prejudices are such strategies of efficiency.
Here is an example: In an experiment by the Bonn neuroscientist Christian Elger, a group of test subjects was shown pictures of well-known brand-name products. They also saw the prices of the products, which were sometimes cheap and sometimes overpriced. Occasionally, a yellow-red discount sign appeared, but not always for the low-priced items. Then the subjects were asked to indicate whether they would purchase the item. The discount sign showed its purchasing effect, with most participants taking the overpriced items that were signaled as inexpensive.
In another experiment, subjects sat in a room containing a cleaning bucket filled with a citrus-scented cleaner – but no one noticed the scent. In one test, this group tended to make pronounced word associations with cleanliness that did not occur in a control group that operated without a citrus scent. In addition, the “scent group” left the room more neatly.
