Visual Marketing | Barbara Kahn and Zab Johnson

How Does Visual Marketing Work?

Dan Loney: The digital transformation continues to roll ahead, with the latest component being the impact of artificial intelligence. There is a greater focus on marketing, especially with the visual component, and that is the focus of a new book by our guests joining me here in studio. The book is titled Visual Marketing: A Practical Guide to the Science of Branding and Retailing. The authors are Barbara Kahn, marketing professor here at the Wharton School, and Elizabeth (Zab) Johnson, who’s executive director and senior fellow of the Wharton Neuroscience Initiative.

Barbara, there’s been so much conversation about the digital transformation. Where do you think we are right now with how much impact it is having in the world of marketing?

Barbara Kahn: The world of marketing and retailing is definitely an omnichannel kind of world, which means it’s not all digital, it’s not all physical, but it’s a seamless translation between the two. The one thing that carries from the physical world to the digital world and back is the visual component. So suddenly, visual marketing is more important than ever. It’s not only true in retailing — where you see things that are being sold in a physical store, and you have to think about how they look in the physical store, then you have to translate that visual imagery, branding to the digital world — but it’s also true in packaging.

You buy things online, and you’re not necessarily looking at a package in the same way as you did in a store. You’re also not looking at the package in the same way when it comes in a box and you open it. There’s a whole new visual canvas that you can look at in the opening of a box, in that sense. Similarly, with branding, you need to have a visual branding identity that goes from all of these different worlds, from the physical world to the digital world. And obviously, a lot of marketing has changed into social media, and a lot of that social media marketing is very visual.

Loney: Zab, the component of neuroscience and retail has exploded in the last couple of decades, in terms of the importance of truly understanding how the consumer thinks about branding. Where does this visual marketing component fit in with the neuroscience side of things?

Elizabeth (Zab) Johnson: I think you’re right that the amount of visual information that is coming to the average viewer has exploded, and that is because we have access to so much more technology-driven things that are visual. We have more choice than we have ever have had before. Because of that, there’s actually a lot of basic, ground truth science, neuroscience, and psychology that we understand about how people take in visual information, how they begin to learn from visual information, associate complex meaning with the kinds of visual information that they’re taking in, make actions, choice, decision, etc.

It was that approach to thinking about both the optimizations that one can make if you understand the basic principles behind the way that we take in visual information and use it to guide our behaviors, and then thinking about how that could also be a challenge. There are some certain limitations. So, ways to optimize for it, and then to be much more aware of the kinds of limitations, the biology constraints.

A New Framework for Marketers

Loney: Barbara, with all the visual content that is out there, it’s probably as challenging for retailers and marketers than it ever has been. We all live on our smartphones, and that’s a big switch that we’ve made in the last 10 to 20 years.

Kahn: That’s why we wrote this book, to give a framework for how marketers can think about it. In working together, it was really nice to have this different approach. Zab came in with the neuroscience approach. Most of my research is in visual marketing, I’ve done that kind of work over time, to look at things that we found united our two approaches. And I think we came in with a new framework of what matters. What are the principles that matter in visual marketing, and how should a marketer think about it?

The first thing is the importance of attention. When Zab’s talking about all this choice in all of these different worlds, what matters to a marketer is what you focus on, what you pay attention to, and we know certain visual properties that are going to drive attention. The second thing that matters is how quickly you can understand things, and that’s going to be a notion of fluency. We also know things from the marketing point of view or from the neuroscience point of view that drives instant understanding of what you see. We found that there was attention, fluency, the formation of perceptions, and then emotional reaction to it, the social reaction to it, and eventually what you choose.

Loney: Speak to that from the neuroscience side.

Johnson: All of those things have underlying biology. One of the things that we start off with in the book is to really debunk this idea that people have a shrinking attention span, for example. This is a notion that’s out in social media, and it gets talked about in lots of different outlets. And from the science, what we know is that attention, as a phenomenon that the human brain does, isn’t changed. We’re not evolving that quickly. We should know that inherently, because we have things like binge watching. People actually are paying attention to content, but it has to really drive engagement to do that.

What has shifted is access to a lot more, and to have the choice of the access points. What that has done is made the cost to moving on to new content much lower. People will just abandon you. [There’s] the notion that you’re trying to get across to them much more rapidly. That means that, as marketers, you have to get down to the basic principles of what biologically is going to drive that in the first place, and then use other principles to maintain engagement.

Loney: What is that process of making that quicker connection with the consumer because of this voluminous content?

Kahn: Maybe our attention spans are not biologically changing, but we all know we have, like, two seconds to deal with anything. What that says is, from a marketing point of view, if in the first 15 seconds I didn’t engage you, I didn’t get your attention, I have no chance. Think about these videos you watch, or these ads you watch before you watch YouTube content. You’ve got to have something in the first five seconds that gets attention and associates the brand with that attention.

That’s going to change the way you develop these ads, just as an example. The same thing is true on packaging or in branding. I don’t have very much time. I’ve got to get your attention. I’ve got to associate the brand. Therefore, you’ve got to know what drives attention. For example, a very obvious one is salience. If something is salient it drives attention. If you’ve got a spark of color or an unusual shape, the eye is going to go to that. So, I’m going to get attention right away, and then I want that attention tied to the brand if I’m trying to maximize the value of my advertising. If you don’t know what this ad is for, obviously it didn’t buy me anything. That’s the same thing with packaging. If I’m trying to create a certain perception about the product, I need to make those connections salient so that you pay attention to it on the package, and fluid so that you associate it with the brand or what I’m trying to sell.

Loney: How that also impact branding? Companies are more focused on brand than ever before, of what they want to do with that brand to deliver that message, connect with the consumer and build on the success they’ve had in the past.

Kahn: I couldn’t agree with you more. I’ve been thinking about this a lot. As we get more and more sophisticated in marketing and all these other things, the one thing that continues to be true is the importance of brand. Why would I pick one product over another? Because I identify with that brand. Americus Reed, my co-host of Marketing Matters talks about brand identity, and he’s right. He’s talking about the tribe. What are the brands that I identify with?

When you think about visual marketing in terms of branding, what people sometimes erroneously think is about design. And yeah, the brand should look pretty, and we want people who have good eyes and know what colors go together, what shapes go together. It does matter, but that’s not what we’re talking about with the visual brand identity. It gets back to those principles that I was talking about in the first place. If I’m going to create a brand identity, I want people to see that everywhere you encounter the brand at every single touch point. I’ve got to design the brand system so that you pay attention to the things I want you to pay attention to, and that you understand what the message is about the brand. The design and the visual features have to speak to the brand identity, the brand mantra. That’s how it differs from a design system to a brand system.

The Future of Visual Marketing

Loney: Zab, it feels like a lot of the elements Barbara has talked about have been around the marketing, whereas you focus on the neuroscience side of this. How new is this, and where might this be taking us in the future?

Johnson: That’s a great question. It is kind of new. These communities were not speaking to one another until very recently. And I think the explosion of analytics in companies means that marketing teams are getting more interdisciplinary. I think they are hiring people that have behavioral science backgrounds, neuroscience backgrounds, and that is influencing the kinds of choices that people are being presented with, and the different environments that people are using. But it’s slow. One of the reasons for the book was to reinforce that these things are really related, and that they should be taken together a lot, because some gut intuition from the marketing standpoint has a real basis in the science. But not all of it is reinforced that way.

Kahn: We’re in the world of big data now. The usual ways that marketers collected data was asking people what they think. We no longer do that, because we know that what people say they think and what they do are two different things. So, we’re looking at data, we’re looking at choice data, behavioral data, stuff like that. But what Zab brings into our book and into the course is the importance of eye-tracking data, for example. I can ask you, “What do you pay attention to?” Well, you can say whatever you want, may or may not be what’s actually true, but your eyes don’t lie. In eye tracking, you can get what really causes attention, and you can get how long you’re looking at things, and how much you’re processing it. The time you spend looking at something is somewhat of a measure of how much processing you’re doing about that thing.

The data now is as legitimate as the behavioral data is. It’s not asking you what you think about it. It’s looking at what your body is really telling us. And then if you add MRI data and you add perspiration and arousal data and all these other things, you can really test how these different visual systems are driving marketing response.

Loney: Is it safe to say that we’re in the early stages of what could be an incredible growth to the impact that visual marketing is going to have on businesses, on consumers, on so much of our culture?

Kahn: When somebody gets a good idea, it goes like rapid fire. I think a lot of advertisers know this. Like I said, you’ve got five seconds in your ad to get there. People are going to go right through that ad. If I don’t get your engagement, I’m done, right? So, they’ll take any tool they can get.

I’m involved in the Advertising Research Federation, Marketing Science Institute, and things like that. We know that these advertisers, these marketers, they’re using these tools, for sure. They’re using eye tracking, they’re using MRI, in addition to customer analytics and purchase behavior and AB testing and all of that. But this is another mechanism. And what I love about it is it’s really focused on the importance of the visual cues.

Loney: Zab. what do you think about this from this scientific side?

Johnson: I think it’s a really exciting time. Again, I think that that we have a lot to learn. That’s one of the reasons why I love the academic side of things. Coming into dialogue with applied learning, we have access to a to a suite of data we could never even dream of. I think this is just going to lead to such great work, where you can take some of the academic neuroscience and now put it into practice, and now see whether the theories hold. At a scale and in the real world, rather than in the constrained laboratory. And I think that’s one of the most exciting situations that we have with this now.