Today introduces the fifth common psychological tendency of human beings: association tendency.
(I) Expression
Question: How to make a dog automatically secrete saliva when the ringtone rings?
Answer: Ring a few bells before giving him food every time. In the future, he will only give him ringtones and not give him food, and he will also secrete saliva.
This is the " classic conditioned reflex " proposed by Nobel Prize winner Pavlov . He proves that both animals and humans will trigger specific behavior patterns due to certain conditions, which we call "association tendencies."
Advertisers have a deep understanding of the great power of "association tendency". They are willing to spend a lot of money just to let their products appear in movies and sports events to make the audience associate the products with their favorite idols.
Once they have this association, they are often willing to pay a high premium to own the item because it makes them feel closer to their idol.
(b) Consequences
(1) A common consequence of association tendency is that people often pay high prices for the quality of the product.
For goods that are not well known, people are often willing to pay high prices because they believe in "you get what you pay for." Therefore, many manufacturers that are not well-known often change the outer packaging of their products and offer a very high price to harvest those buyers who are associated with "high price" to "high quality".
This sales strategy does play a good role in promotion and greatly improves profits, especially in some products with serious information asymmetry, such as antiques, calligraphy and paintings, jewelry, technology products, etc.
(2) Another consequence of association tendency is that people are prone to success from the past and success from the future.
Someone happened to make money from the casino, so he had an illusory association and sold all his wealth to gamble, and soon lost everything.
Napoleon I led his army to defeat the anti-French alliance formed by Britain, Putrajaya, Russia and other countries, and spread across the European continent. He firmly believed that he was an invincible god of war, and he eventually returned home despite the opposition of everyone's opposition to invading Russia.
has suffered numerous failures due to false associations.
(III) Use
Since the power of association tendency is so powerful, how do we use association tendency to create value for ourselves?
(1) It is important to be good at arousing customer associations. A man who buys shoe polish may subconsciously pay attention to the cost-effectiveness of shoe polish, but his own attention. Therefore, shoe polish printed with beautiful girls' smiles is often sold out.
A woman who bought toothpaste may not be looking for toothpaste that helps her solve the effects of sterilization and mouth protection, but a toothpaste that can help her enhance her personal charm. So, toothpaste with shiny teeth printed on the outer packaging is often sold out.
(2) When using the positive power of association tendency, we must also be vigilant against the negative effects that association tendencies are prone to, and avoid making stupid decisions due to past success.
First of all, we need to find out the accidental factors in past success and beware of the failures that may be caused by changes in these accidental factors.
Secondly, when making new decisions, beware of possible environmental changes and the impact of environmental changes on the applicability of past successful experiences.
Finally, you need to think about what unknown variables you will encounter and the impact these unknown variables may have on our success.
