Heuristic and nostalgia in advertising...

Have you ever thought how it is possible that you buy one product instead of another? Maybe you not, but marketing and advertising specialist know a lot about this topic. They divided products into five categories from low involvement to high involvement products. Low involvement products are necessary for us to live, we buy it everyday without thinking about price (because these are usually cheap) or a brand (because these are usually not exist) e.g. bread. High involvement are products bought once for a whole life or only a few times during our life. Before making a choice we must find out more about brand, quality or a price of a product e.g. car or house. The process strongly related to our buying habits is called heuristic. According to what is.com The term seems to have two usages:

1) Describing an approach to learning by trying without necessarily having an organized hypothesis or way of proving that the results proved or disproved the hypothesis. That is, "seat-of-the-pants" or "trial-by-error" learning.

2) Pertaining to the use of the general knowledge gained by experience, sometimes expressed as "using a rule-of-thumb." (However, heuristic knowledge can be applied to complex as well as simple everyday problems. Human chess players use a heuristic approach.)

Another theory related to heuristic is a Fast and Frugal Heuristics, delevoped by Goldsetin and Gigerenzer (2004). They claim that:

Fast and frugal heuristics are rules of thumb for decision making that are:

1. ecologically rational (that is, they exploit structures of information in the environment)
2. founded in evolved psychological capacities such as memory and the perceptual system
3. fast, frugal, and simple enough to operate effectively when time, knowledge, and computational might are limited
4. precise enough to be modeled computationally
5. powerful enough to model both good and poor reasoning.

More information can be found in Simple Heuritics which make us Smart by Gerd Gigerenzer, Peter M. Todd & the ABC Research Group.

Nostalgia

Everyone of us knows that advertising’s specialists manipulate our brains everyday. One of their tricks is using nostalgia that is bringing back our memories and associations from the past. As it is said in Sterns book (1992) nostalgic thoughts may be generated from either a personally remembered past (personal nostalgia) or from a time in history before one was born (historical/communal nostalgia). Advertising specialists affect on all our senses: smell, sight, taste, hearing and touch. One of the best existed example of nostalgia in ads is Coca Cola Christmas advert, it is known all around the world and it has not been changed for years. People can associate this advert with wonderful time during Christmas. The result of this advert is obvious, people buy coca-cola (and many other products with similar ads) in bigger amount of bottles, not because of its taste but because of good memories related to Christmas atmosphere.

I also found a very interesting but very long and detailed article about Using Nostalgia in Advertising.