Our Daily Activation
The ability of the beautiful and the ugly to activate us is also used in advertizing: The "activation potential" plays an important role when it comes to judge the effect of advertizing. The term activation potential stands for the ability to increase the customers' attention. There are three main categories: "emotional stimuli", "intellectual stimuli" and "physical stimuli".
Emotional stimuli are those that appeal to the feelings and motives of people. They spontaneously attract great attention and hardly enervate. Which stimuli do have a particularly strong effect in the isolated case depends on the individual person.
Examples for categories of emotional stimuli:
- babies
- success
- eroticism
- safety
- pleasure
- health
- happiness
- infants
- love
- curiosity
- prestige
- security
- (young) animals
- independence
- familiarity
- affection
All these stimuli have a pleasant effect on us, we associate them with being happy and content.
"Beauty in art: Replication of felicity", wrote Nietzsche. Our marketing experts have also recognized this and many advertisements are therefore designed according to the motto: "success in advertizing: depiction of felicity".
There is, of course, also negative advertizing. This does not contradict our previous considerations. On the contrary, it even underpins them: Categories of emotional stimuli in advertizing also comprise terms such as fear, thirst, hunger, conflict, destruction and so forth. They activate us just as strongly as terms referring to beauty and happiness, only vice versa: Ugliness and misfortune then attract our attention. We will seldom see a car accident without the obligatory crowd of gawping onlookers. Misfortune activates us: The "gawpers' " reason is not strong enough to bridle their emotions.Misfortune activates their attention and this results in curious gawping.
Among marketing experts, the activation potential of something beautiful and something ugly is considered to be equally strong, naturally dependent on the target group. If this target group is represented by the "broad public", it is of course more efficient to attract attention with the help of positive associatons, i.e. with something beautiful
Intellectual stimuli are those that challenge our perceptive faculty and comprehension. They arouse astonishment, give food for thought or provoke contradiction. Intellectual stimuli do not activate as strong as emotional stimuli, and they use up relatively fast.
Examples for categories of intellectual stimuli:
- surprise
- newness
- intellectual conflict
- complexity
- alienation
- contradictory to something familiar
- originality
- provocations
Physical stimuli attract attention simply by being immense. They have an effect on almost everybody and match with almost any product. Physical stimuli are the most important ones as regards adverts, but they do not play an essential role for web sites. The reason for this is that an advert has to stop the cursory readers, and it has to attract their attention among all the other adverts.
Examples for physical stimuli:
- color
- colorfulness
- magnitude
- contrast
- clearness
- pithiness
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