Classical conditioning concepts in marketing campaigns and advertisements

Classical Conditioning

Marketers make extensive use of classical conditioning techniques. In brief, classical conditioning combines a stimulus with an unconditioned response and a stimulus with no conditioned response. Through repetition of this combination, it is expected that eventually the stimulus that previously had no response would now have a response, that being the conditioned response (PsychPost, 2012). Through the use of these techniques, marketers elicit specific responses in consumers. Repetition is used, as ads are replayed dozens of times before they have the desired effect. For example, while a cold cola might not be intrinsically thirst-quenching (being too sticky, sweet, and even salty), repetition of thirst-quenching imagery alongside the soda has conditioned millions to believe that a cold soda is better for quenching thirst than water. Stimulus discrimination is sometimes poor, meaning that consumers will elicit a conditioned response to a stimulus that is similar, but not identical to, the original one (Cherry, 2013). This is stimulus generalization, or the lack of stimulus discrimination.

Many companies have been effective at licensing, cobranding and brand extensions. One such brand is Disney. This company began as a media producer but has taken its brands into other realms. Disney has long had licensed products relating to its properties, from which it derives additional revenues. Disney has also extended its brand well beyond media, to theme parks and a cruise line for example. These take the loose concept of performance, something the company excelled at with its media, and applied it to vastly different industries.

There are many opportunities for our company in co-branding, licensing and brand extension. One of the reasons these techniques work is because consumers are conditioned to respond in a certain way to our brand. Thus, when the brand is strong, consumers have specific feelings about that brand that have been conditioned responses. The key to co-branding, licensing and brand extensions is that we take that conditioned response and apply it to another product. Particularly when we think about stimulus discrimination, we understand that the value of the brand -- the response from the customer -- is most powerful when it is applied to a product that is similar to what we do. When we consider Disney, they have extended their brand to products that involve likenesses of their characters. So everything that they do -- from movies to plush toys to theme parks -- has a certain continuity because it always involves finding a way to bring their characters to life somehow.

Brand extensions and family branding also leverage the work that we have already done in building our brands. Nobody gets to be a large company without investing in brand-building. The best way to make use of our most successful brands is to extend them and build entire brand families around them.