How advertisements break habituation
It’s the climax of the movie and you couldn’t be more thrilled to find out what happens next. And then comes the interruption. You have to sit through all the ads as they play one after another. You have probably seen them so many times that you know exactly what’s coming up. Oh, wait! That’s something new. McDonald’s new ad gets you staring at the juicy burger once again and you have a sudden craving for it.
Let us rewind and figure out what may have happened. A couple of weeks back McDonalds launched its new peri-peri crispy chicken burger. And with this, an ad to market its product. When the ad played out initially, teens and adults were equally hooked on to it. The consumption of the newly launched product shot up. As the days passed by, people got habituated to the ad and no longer felt the same way they initially did. When I say habituation, I intend to convey a basic form of learning which leads to behavioural modifications. People now responded less to the same ad. How can McDonalds afford this? They have to break this habituation that people got into.
The solution to this comes from another form of behavioural modification that ad industries have been exploiting for a while. Sensitization is an increased response to a stimulus which occurs after presenting a secondary stimulus. To get rid of the habituation effect, McDonalds introduces a new ad for the same product, this time exaggerating some other aspects of it. If they focused on the crispiness of their chicken, perhaps this time it might be the peri-peri seasoning on the crunchy patty. This new stimuli would get you crazy over the burger ad once again and would make you want to eat one. Now we know why industries have more than one single ad for their products.
Since we are talking of food, have you wondered why fast foods which have complex flavours are such a big hit? With the use of multiple flavours, they make sure that with eat bite we taste a particular flavour. They just don’t let you get habituated to the taste, do they? With every bite they make you want it more and more!
