Researchers from the University of British Columbia’s Sauder School of Business have found that the color red increases both attention to detail and risk aversion.  Blue, however, produces a strong sense of openness to new things and enhances creative thinking.

These variances are caused by different unconscious motivations that red and blue activate, says [researcher Juliet] Zhu, noting that colour influences cognition and behavior through learned associations.

“Thanks to stop signs, emergency vehicles and teachers’ red pens, we associate red with danger, mistakes and caution,” says Zhu, whose previous research has looked at the impact of ceiling height on consumer choices. “The avoidance motivation, or heightened state, that red activates makes us vigilant and thus helps us perform tasks where careful attention is required to produce a right or wrong answer.”

Conversely, blue encourages us to think outside the box and be creative, says Zhu, noting that the majority of participants believed incorrectly that blue would enhance their performance on all cognitive tasks.

“Through associations with the sky, the ocean and water, most people associate blue with openness, peace and tranquility,” says Zhu, who conducted the research with UBC PhD candidate Ravi Mehta. “The benign cues make people feel safe about being creative and exploratory. Not surprisingly it is people’s favourite colour.”

In a study of more than 600 people, the two researchers tracked performance over a range of tasks that included solving anagrams, designing toys, and assessing marketing.  Not Exactly Rocket Science has a nice summary of one experiment in which subjects were asked to judge two versions of an ad for a digital camera, one providing specific and detailed information and the other showing generic travel images (things like maps).   When the ads appeared against a red background, subjects were more receptive to the detailed version; when they appeared against a blue background, subjects were drawn to the visual, if more generic, version.

These findings also reveal another interesting implication for integrating color with messaging and packaging:

[P]eople were more receptive to a new, fictional brand of toothpaste that focused on negative messages such as “cavity prevention” when the background colour was red, whereas people were more receptive to aspirational messages such as “tooth whitening” when the background colour was rendered in blue.

The release on Science Daily  is here.

In yesterday’s New York Times, Stanley Fish reviews The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the University by Frank Donoghue.  According to Donoghue, the time of the traditional, liberal arts institution is over.

Donoghue begins by challenging the oft-repeated declaration that liberal arts education in general and the humanities in particular face a crisis, a word that suggests an interruption of a normal state of affairs and the possibility of restoring the natural order of things.

“Such a vision of restored stability,” says Donoghue, “is a delusion” because the conditions to which many seek a return – healthy humanities departments populated by tenure-track professors who discuss books with adoring students in a cloistered setting – have largely vanished. Except in a few private wealthy universities (functioning almost as museums), the splendid and supported irrelevance of humanist inquiry for its own sake is already a thing of the past. In “ two or three generations,” Donoghue predicts, “humanists . . . will become an insignificant percentage of the country’s university instructional workforce.”

The “ethic of productivity” has overtaken the ethic of contemplation. We already see this in the operations of liberal arts institutions: “in the very colleges and universities where the life of the mind is routinely celebrated, the material conditions of the workplace are configured by the business model that scorns it.”  These schools market themselves as bastions of thoughtful examination, but internal discussions are about customer service, maximizing efficiencies, and minimizing costs.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, the for-profit university, which explicitly rejects talk about the life of the mind, is gaining influence and redefining the liberal arts model as a luxury.  (Just look at Kaplan’s new ad.)  Learning should be a means to an end, and teaching about imparting instrumental knowledge, not inspiring appreciation.  Consequently, according to Donoghue, “ ‘all fields deemed impractical, such as philosophy, art history, and literature, will henceforth face a constant danger of being deemed unnecessary.’ And as a corollary ‘professors will come to be seen by everyone (not just those outside the academy) as unaffordable anomalies.’ ”

The current recession, assuming it’s as long and as deep as some economists predict, will exacerbate these tensions and accelerate these trends.  Students–adult learners and traditional undergraduates–will demand more concrete, practical, and immediate payoffs for their investment.  (And, as we’ve seen with Kaplan and the University of Phoenix recently, those corporations recognize that their moment has come.)  This means traditional liberal arts institutions will face even harder choices in the future, and passivity today will only further weaken their perceptions in the market.  For institutions that talk about the virtues of self-examination, now is the time to put those reflective abilities into practice.

A study appearing in the Journal of Marketing Research in April examines how a sense of effort impacts the way consumers respond to brands. The study shows that consumers who were forced to work a little bit when confronted by a brand viewed the brand more positively.

The researchers’ findings show, first, that brand opinions are not static or fixed.

“The message is that people don’t just form brand opinions and stick with them,” said [Sharon] Shavitt, a professor of business administration. “Instead, they’re constantly monitoring their sense of understanding. They may in fact be swinging between doubt and closure more often than we think.”

Second, by requiring effort, consumers have to actively manage their understanding of the brand, rather than simply processing it along normal (and, presumably, unconscious) lines.

“A sense of difficulty threatens consumers’ metacognitive comfort zone and can lead them to doubt their understanding of an established brand,” Shavitt said. “Consumers expect a strong sense of understanding for those brands, and when that’s threatened it can lead them to be more open to reevaluating a brand.”

Shavitt goes on to claim that distracting situations may in fact be beneficial for brands—provided that the conditions induce doubt about previous understandings of the brand. In other words, not all distractions are helpful.

Marketers also can plant a sense of struggle, [Shavitt] said, such as contests or online surveys with new information that runs counter to a brand’s traditional image. McDonald’s, one of the brands included in the study, could instill doubt by asking consumers how many salad varieties are on menus or the sodium content of its burgers and fries, she said.

On one level, the results aren’t surprising. Marketers have known for a long time that the best marketing will challenge audiences’ presuppositions. People crave a sense of discovery, especially when it relates to something they’re already familiar with.

On another level, though, if the findings are accurate, brand awareness is much more malleable and dynamic than commonly believed.

One complaint: The Science Daily article reporting the study makes no distinction between forms of effort: it lumps physical distractions (such as blurry print) and cognitive dissonance together. My sense is that forcing audiences to reconcile dissonant ideas about a brand has far more beneficial effects than taxing the attention of the already distracted consumer.

Here’s the Science Daily article.

NewTeeVee provides highlights of Deloitte’s “The State of the Media Democracy” report, which will be released at next month’s Consumer Electronics Show. In the meantime, here are some relevant data:

Millennials (ages 14 - 25) spend more time with media per week, but less time watching television, and mobile devices are primary entertainment channels for them.

Television remains the most impactful and influential advertising medium across all age groups, and watching television was the most preferred type of media for consumers as whole. Millennials were the exception with their media preferences scattered across TV, movies and the Internet; all were important to them

Fewer people are willing to pay for content in exchange for an ad-free environment. The percentage of people willing to cough up for no ads dropped to 26 percent in 2008 from 37 percent in 2007.

Millennials watch more UGC than professionally-produced content online, and they say they do so because it is more entertaining than traditional media choices.

One to One Interactive has released a study conducted by OTOInsights, its research/neuromarketing arm, that examines why some Internet videos go viral.

General Findings

[D]ata from the study does not suggest any correlation between engagement, emotion, and the length of a video. Long videos (three minutes or greater) and short videos (two minutes or less) are equally likely to have high or low engagement scores. This finding suggests that Internet videos do not need to be limited to sound bite productions or even standard television commercial length. Internet video viewers are willing to view longer productions so long as they’re engaging.

…

Insight 1: Viewer Responses to Internet Videos are Emotionally Complex
… Marketers need to be aware of the range and complexity of emotional responses to quickly consumed and produced digital creatives like Internet video. Similarly, marketers need to guard against allowing their research and analysis methods to become overly reductive about emotional response. Emotional states are seldom monolithic. Even if the videos seem self-evident in their meanings, viewers’ reactions to them are quietly sophisticated.

…

Insight 2:  Engagement Scores Substantially Enhance Interpretability of User Ratings
Marketers designing and evaluating digital media creative assets are not well served by the lack of feedback provided by common ratings systems. Given the importance of ratings systems in video popularity…, it is critical that marketers develop a better understanding of why users might give a video an undesirable rating.

…

Insight 3: Viewer Engagement and Video Success are Positively Linked
This data suggests that a certain level of emotional engagement is a necessary, though not sufficient, predictor of a viral video’s success. In other words, it is unlikely that a video lacking a certain amount of emotional engageability will spread virally, regardless of other factors. At the same time, just because a video has this emotional engageability by no means guarantees that it will go viral; other factors (e.g., word of mouth, computer-based recommendation systems, and trendy cultural topics and memes) will influence a given video’s viral ability.

Some of the methods and findings rely too heavily on OTOInsights proprietary methodology to be immediately applicable to most people.  But if you’re considering employing video in your marketing efforts,  the general points are helpful reminders and challenges to the often simplistic ideas we have about what makes for successful videos.

(Hat tip to Roger Dooley of Neuromarketing.)

That creativity requires novelty is common knowledge, but neuroscientists are beginning to understand why:

Perception and imagination are linked because the brain uses the same neural circuits for both functions. Imagination is like running perception in reverse. The reason it’s so difficult to imagine truly novel ideas has to do with how the brain interprets signals from your eyes. The images that strike your retina do not, by themselves, tell you with certainty what you are seeing. Visual perception is largely a result of statistical expectations, the brain’s way of explaining ambiguous visual signals in the most likely way. And the likelihood of these explanations is a direct result of past experience.

Entire books have been written about learning, but the important elements for creative thinkers can be boiled down to this: Experience modifies the connections between neurons so that they become more efficient at processing information. Neuroscientists have observed that while an entire network of neurons might process a stimulus initially, by about the sixth presentation, the heavy lifting is performed by only a subset of neurons. Because fewer neurons are being used, the network becomes more efficient in carrying out its function.

…

Fortunately, the networks that govern both perception and imagination can be reprogrammed. By deploying your attention differently, the frontal cortex, which contains rules for decision making, can reconfigure neural networks so that you can see things that you didn’t see before. You need a novel stimulus — either a new piece of information or an unfamiliar environment — to jolt attentional systems awake. The more radical the change, the greater the likelihood of fresh insights.

The Fast Company article has more–and explains why corporate retreat/brainstorming sessions don’t work.