Although I haven't seen these 7up ads yet, the first one sounds like they
are working on the same principle as the Grant Hill Sprite commercials of a
while back where Sprite basically said, "don't buy Sprite because we hired
an athlete to tell you to drink it -- drink it because you want to." It
played off of adolescents' cynicism toward advertising in a very ironic way.
This one sounds like a parody of a taste test that says, "don't buy a
product because the ad uses a taste test (which is probably faked anyway).
Buy it because you like it." The second one sounds like an imitation of the
Mountain Dew Cheetah commercial that debuted on the Super Bowl a few years
back, where the Cheetah steals a Mountain Dew and a guy on a BMX bike chases
it down and pulls the can out of his throat and then drinks it.
These commercials are developed with intense market research and adolescent
focus groups. The advertisers have little concern with classical
conditioning and a great deal of concern about being "edgy". Frontline on
PBS had an excellent examination of this topic recently in an episode
called, "Merchants of Cool". I used it in my Adolescent Psych class. The
main point was that advertisers try to spot trends in the making, capitalize
on them while they are cool thus destroying their coolness in the process.
It is, therefore, a never-ending cycle of finding the next cool thing,
killing it with commercial exploitation and moving on to the next cool
thing. They showed how this worked in various media including music (MTV and
cult rock groups that go mainstream) and advertising (Sprite is a case
study). I personally think that every adolescent should see this video to
see the kind of machinations that go on behind the scenes to shape their
buying habits.
Rick Froman
Dr. Richard L. Froman
Psychology Department
John Brown University
Siloam Springs, AR 72761
e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.jbu.edu/sbs/psych/froman.htm
-----Original Message-----
From: John W. Kulig [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Monday, April 16, 2001 9:57 AM
To: Jim Guinee
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: 7up commercial
Jim Guinee wrote:
> Has anyone seen the new 7up commercials?
>
> There are at least two that have been shown in my area. In both, a nicely
> dressed African-American man is touting 7 up:
>
> 1) One is a taste test, where he has people taste the "alternative
beverage,"
> that alternative usually being something really gross (e.g., sour milk).
>
> 2) In the other, he whips a 7up can and commands a cute little doggie to
> "fetch." The dog chases down the can, gets under it, and gets whomped on
> the noggin. At the end of the commercial, the dude is picking up the can
> and the dog is upside down, all four legs in the air. He may not be dead,
but
> he looks like it.
>
> Doesn't this seem like a really bad use of classical conditioning? I
would
> think viewers might connect 7up to being nauseated (taste test) and
> being distressed (puppy).
Well - the whole thing is vicarious. Though Pavlov did distinguish the first
signal system (CC) from the second (language).
>
> If I was teaching gen psych, I'd be curious as to how students would
evaluate
> these commercials as good/bad examples of CC.
>
I say the sour milk one, and I thought it was in poor taste, terrible,
manipulative, and stupid. But, they work. Many man/woman hours of work goes
into
their creation, piloting, etc. They are designed to work. Academic
psychologists
can probably pick up a few hints on human behavior/nature from them. I'm
sure they
would LOVE to hear a college class is having a lengthy discussion about this
commercial. Play the commerical a few times in class, have a lengthy
discussion
about whether 7 up really does taste better, maybe a little taste testing,
etcetera (Keep 7UP on their brain's radar screen a little longer).
Blame J.B. Watson for introduction of these techniques into advertising. He
also
pioneered the use of celebrity endorsements. Somehow he convinced Princess
Anne
(was it Anne?) of Romania to do a soap commerial - and the rest is history
(as
they say!).
--
---------------------------------------------------------------
John W. Kulig [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Department of Psychology http://oz.plymouth.edu/~kulig
Plymouth State College tel: (603) 535-2468
Plymouth NH USA 03264 fax: (603) 535-2412
---------------------------------------------------------------
"What a man often sees he does not wonder at, although he knows
not why it happens; if something occurs which he has not seen before,
he thinks it is a marvel" - Cicero.
