Language scientist and Adjunct Professor of Linguistics and Psychology at the University of Calgary, Alberta, Canada, Julie Sedivy was kind enough to take the time to answer a few questions about her perceptive and groundbreaking book, co-authored with Greg Carlson Sold on Language: How Advertisers Talk to You and What This Says About You.
Julie Sedivy describes how intense marketplace competition forges the very language and word choices that advertisers and marketers use to persuade potential customers to purchase the offered goods and services.
Thanks to Julie Sedivy for her time, and for her comprehensive responses to the questions. They are greatly appreciated.
What was the background to writing this book Sold on Language: How Advertisers Talk to You and What This Says About You?
Julie Sedivy: I’m trained as a language scientist, and have spent the last 20 years immersed in research on language and the mind. It has a way of leaking into your everyday encounters with language—you start to notice certain linguistic devices and think about their psychological impact. It also became clear to me that many of these devices worked their magic at a level that wasn’t easy to access consciously. To anyone studying the human mind, this isn’t all that surprising, since we know that a great deal of our thought processes happen quite automatically and without conscious deliberation, all the while shaping our behavior.
But at the same time, it feels like our choices are made by consciously weighing arguments and information, because the rest of our cognition hums along without our awareness! So we can have very mistaken beliefs about our own responses if we simply rely on our own intuitions about how we think and choose. This book is an attempt to bridge that gap. Greg Carlson (my co-author) and I were hoping to give readers the tools to begin to make the same kinds of observations about ads that we were able to make based on our scientific training.
How important is the role of choice as created through advertising, and is there a downside to that wide range of choice as well?
Julie Sedivy: For sure, advertising makes it possible for new products to break into the marketplace, increasing our range of options, and in many cases, creating better options. But the huge range of choices can and does lead to cognitive paralysis. There’s evidence that when faced with too many choices of products, people are less likely to choose any of them, because the task is simply too daunting. A proliferation of choices also has profound effects on the nature of advertising practices simply because it leads to increased ad clutter.
When there’s brutal competition among advertisers for your mental real estate, there’s a tendency to move away from information-rich ads that play to your conscious thought processes, and towards ad messages that can be effective even with shallow or unconscious levels of attention. From the consumer’s perspective, this diminishes the level of control that he or she ultimately has over their responses to ads.
Julie Sedivy (photo left)
Advertisers speak to potential customers in very short messages. How does the choice of language used in the advertisement change its impact?
Julie Sedivy: Because of its compression, advertising these days is a lot like poetry: every single word has to be the right word. And small words can really change the meaning or impression of an ad. One example we use in the book is the very brief tagline for Altoids Mints, which has over the years proclaimed its product as “The Curiously Strong Mints.” The same phrase would have much less impact without the tiny word “the”. The purpose of the tagline is not just to inform you that the mints are curiously strong, but to suggest that they’re the only ones that are, and what’s more, that these are those curiously strong mints that everyone’s been talking about. I think of poetry and advertising both as requiring an Olympic level of verbal mastery.
Are more advertisers targeting the unconscious mind to achieve greater message response?
Julie Sedivy: Yes, you can see some striking differences between the ads produced in the 1950s and 1960s by advertising giants such as David Ogilvy, and the ads we see nowadays. The older ads tend to tell you a great deal more about the product, whereas today’s marketing is much more heavily focused on emotional responses and impressions—and increasingly, on activating certain social identities. Some of these changes are due to the sheer volume of advertising, as I mentioned earlier, where ads have to be able to have an impact even if you’re not devoting your full attention to them.
And the increasing compression of advertising in terms of its length has also resulted in the need for messages whose effects reverberate well beyond what’s there on their surface meanings. But this already-existing trend towards less consciously-processed information in ads has certainly been accelerated by the scientific research over the last decade or two. We’re finding out that unconscious—and even subliminal—messages can have much more impact on our behavior than we’d thought and the advertising industry is taking note of these developments.
How has the latest research in brain science changed the way that advertisers use language?
Julie Sedivy: One area where you see a lot of attention to the unconscious associations that can be triggered by language is in the political arena. A fascinating discussion of political language can be found in “Words that Work”, a 2007 book published by Frank Luntz, a political consultant for the Republican Party, and advisor to Preston Manning and the Reform Party in Canada. For example, Luntz suggests that the phrase “exploring for energy” evokes more positive feelings than “drilling for oil”. Doesn’t it bring to mind open vistas and courageous mavericks, rather than heavy machinery and black goop? There are close ties between politics and experts in language and psychology on both ends of the ideological spectrum. For instance, Drew Westen’s book “The Political Brain,” in which he argued that liberal political messaging needs to better tap into unconscious processes, was credited with influencing Democratic campaign strategies in recent years.
You describe ads in the book as not saying what they mean, or meaning what they say. What do you mean by that?
Julie Sedivy: A great deal of meaning that we derive from language comes not from the words themselves, but from inferences that we make from filling in gaps, or reading between the lines. For example, a few decades ago, Ford came out with the rather startling claim that “The new Ford is 700% quieter.” But it didn’t specify: quieter than what? Consumers would quite predictably assume that this meant “quieter than the old model,” or “quieter than the competition.” But when pressed to substantiate the claim, Ford somewhat disingenuously said that what they meant was that it was 700% quieter on the inside of the car than on the outside. This is an extreme example, but the use of implications that rely on the audience to connect the dots are very common in advertising.
Are different messages with entirely different words used to reach different target markets?
Julie Sedivy: Yes, you often see this with large companies that advertise their products to a big swath of population, but try to personalize their messages to specific segments so as to create a more intimate relationship with the consumer. McDonald’s is one company that has done this, having mounted different websites aimed at, for example, African-American, and Hispanic-America populations. There are also some beautiful examples of regional ads that McDonald’s aired in New England, using a dialect that was completely incomprehensible to outsiders. I’ve blogged about this ad campaign on my blog at Psychology Today: http://t.co/ksDO9AS
How has the use of language affected the range of choice for consumers in making their buying decisions?
Julie Sedivy: One very interesting development is the increasing trend in marketing products as expressing a certain identity and set of values. This means that the marketplace can contain many different products that are very similar to each other in terms of the product features, but that have different identities attached to them. This increases the number of options, but also constrains choice in interesting ways. For instance, in the book, we talk about some friends of mine who were deciding between the purchase of a Subaru and a Passat with very similar features, but in the end, chose the Subaru simply because, in their words, “We’re just not Passat people.”
What is the future of language use research in advertising?
Julie Sedivy: I think there’s a whole set of interesting questions that have to do with individual differences in terms of cognitive style and personality traits. The science of persuasion is actually turning out to be quite complex. It’s hard to identify a single variable that will always enhance persuasion, and sometimes the same variable will actually decrease persuasion. Its effects often depend on the situation, but also on the psychological make-up of the recipient of the message. Given the growing interest in personalizing advertising messages, and in marketing to specific audiences, I think there will be a lot of research action in this particular area.
What is next for Julie Sedivy?
Julie Sedivy: At the moment, I’m working on a number of projects that stem from my own love affair with language. I’m working on a textbook on the psychology of language, and I’m flexing my verbal muscles and writing a book of poetry (who knows, I may even wrihttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifte some ads). But I foresee many of my efforts in the near future to be aimed at educating a broad audience about the nature of persuasion, especially as it applies to political contexts. Here, I feel it’s really quite important for us to understand how we as citizens respond to persuasive messages. There’s too much at stake for us to be making these choices unconsciously. So I imagine I will do a fair bit of teaching, speaking and writing on this topic.
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My book review of Sold on Language: How Advertisers Talk to You and What This Says About You by Julie Sedivy and Greg Carlson.
Julie Sedivy is Adjunct Professor of Linguistics and Psychology at the University of Calgary, Alberta, Canada. She has published dozens of research articles on her experimental studies of language comprehension and production in children and adults. She has served as Associate Editor for the journal Linguistics and Philosophy, and currently writes the Sold on Language blog for Psychology Today.
