If you’ve read The Secret of Selling you’ll already know about the way in which apparently peripheral elements can have a dramatic influence on consumer behaviour.

It all stems from the fact that the different areas of our brains get involved in shaping our behaviour in ways that we don’t always identify accurately. Something reaches part of the brain and triggers a response, whilst the conscious mind is busily occupied elsewhere.

In much the same way that a magician uses our inability to focus on more than one thing at once to make the card disappear, we’re left oblivious to what’s happened.

When it comes to advertising it’s no surprise that the same principles come in to play. What’s interesting is the way in which some very basic ‘logic’ influences just how that unconscious influence occurs, and it’s something that is very useful for anyone involved in marketing communication to know.

You might think that, if you’re advertising something it makes sense to have your advert placed near an article that relates to the same subject. The associations from the article can be related to your product.

But it doesn’t always work like that.

Researchers investigated how people responded to adverts whilst manipulating the difficulty of the article that they encountered beforehand in a magazine.

What they discovered was that if the article was difficult to read (something they manipulated by the type and size of font selected rather than the slightly more subjective adjustment of the content itself) then people responded more favourably to a subsequent advert that was easy to process.

It seems that, in the context of the difficult article, the positive relief of being able to understand the ad easily is inadvertently projected onto the advert.

But that’s not all.

When the advert had a connection to the article of the content the ad was liked less even if it was easy to read in comparison. The unconscious associations between the company and the difficult article cause the reader to like the advertised product less too.

So if someone says, “You should advertise in my magazine because it is all about products like yours”, you would do well to check the editorial style first.

Similarly, if you have sales pages on-line, it’s worth checking that it is as easy to read as possible. Otherwise, by the time you introduce your product you may well find that potential customers are feeling less good about whatever you’re selling.

Source: Shen et al. Contrast and Assimilation Effects of Processing Fluency. Journal of Consumer Research, 2009; 090820054939078