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Comment by r0s | Hacker News Reader

Lots of theory here but surely there's some solid science that can address these ideas?

It's quite simple to suggest an experiment to prove the article's point (which I find very convincing).

Look at an ad for a product you own (e.g. iPhone) that you perceive as conveying some form of emotion. Now, go use that product.

Do you feel the emotion portrayed in the ad?

To make this more scientific, expand the above test to a few hundred people. Query their emotional state with a survey (or possibly by facial expressions, if that's considered an accurate means of evaluating emotional response). Do this for a number of products, ensuring that boring products (e.g. household cleaning products) are included to rule out emotion generated from the intrinsic properties of the product. Then check for the existence/non-existence of a correlation between the emotion felt and the emotion portrayed.

That experiment would not accurately test the emotional inception theory. The theory states that given ads associating a product with a positive emotion, people will eventually feel that emotion when they see the product in the store, and be compelled to buy it. Your experiment tests whether people feel that emotion when they use the advertised product after having bought it. You might assume that these answers would match, but that is a dangerous and unnecessary assumption.

I have an idea for a more accurate experiment. Survey a number of people about what brands of some product they buy, if any. The product should be something that does not currently have many ads for it (like bedsheets), so that cultural imprinting is not a factor. Then send them a weekly email newsletter on some random topic. Each newsletter would also contains ads for a certain brand of that product.

The people would be split into two groups. For half of them, the ad for the product tries to associate the brand with a positive image. For the other half, the ad tries to associate the brand with a neutral image, while otherwise keeping the text the same. This splitting into groups ensures that “honest signaling” is not a confounding factor.

To ensure that the participant opens the newsletter and sees the ads, participants would be asked to search each newsletter for a piece of information and reply to the email with that information.

After three months of the newsletters, participants would be surveyed again about what brands of the product they buy, if any. If emotional imprinting theory is accurate, the participants who were shown the positive images should have increased their purchasing of that brand of product more than the neutral-image participants increased their purchasing.

The article itself sort of suggests a way. Gather data on how much advertisers are spending on television ads. See if there's a super-linear correlation between non-fragmented audience size and ad dollars spent.

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