One: Dogs, Cats, and Marketing
Ivan Pavlov was interested in physiology rather than psychology - his discovery that dogs salivated when they witnessed the signals that food was about to be provided was initially accidental, and he was likely unaware that paying closer attention to the mechanism of salivation would have such a dramatic impact on the field of psychology.
Thus was born the notion of stimulus and response: the observation that involuntary behavior could be elicited by controlling the sensory information that a subject received was exciting news, that was applied well beyond the scope of involuntary responses in animals to the voluntary behavior of human beings.
In particular, the field of marketing was covetous of this degree of control, and sought to determine which bells it could ring to get people to respond, to open their wallets and purchase products regardless of whether they needed or wanted them.
And for a time, it seemed to be working - and ironically enough, the marketers themselves became subject to the same kind of conditioning they were attempting to place upon customers: they came to expect that ringing the bell would bring customers running, and were dumbfounded when it did not seem to work.
Cooking up a Conditioned Response
To understand why conditioned response no longer works, it is first necessary to understand how it did work. It is not, as some assume, an immediate response, but one that requires time and effort to develop.
Conditioned response is not instantaneous. Even in Pavlov's experiments, it required repetition to make the connections in the mind of an animal - that is, there is nothing in the mind of a canine that associates the sound of a bell to the appearance of food until the two have happened conjointly for several repetitions.
And unless the food consistently appears after ringing a bell, any association that may have been forming is broken.
Far-Reaching Implications
Pavlov's results with dogs were carried into the marketing trade by JB Watson, a behaviorist of questionable repute. Watson crossed the line of ethics with the "Little Albert" experiment in which he was able to condition a fear response into an eleven-month-old child by subjecting him to traumatic conditions, and was ultimately ousted from academia in the wake of a sex scandal - and then was hired by an advertising agency
While his ethics were questionable and even the scientific validity of his results was suspect, he developed advertising for major brands including Maxwell House coffee, Pond's cold cream, and Johnson's baby powder. By 1924 he had become a vice-president in a very successful agency, and other firms sought to model themselves after his success.
Dogs, Cats, and Customers
Pavlov had chosen dogs for his experiments because their digestive systems are physiologically similar to those of humans. Since his aim was physiology, he did not consider whether there was a psychological similarity, as the psychological observations were an accidental side-effect rather than the point of his experiment.
It has often been joked that, if Pavlov had chosen to experiment on cats, he would never have stumbled across the notion of conditioning. Cats are aloof and less submissive and malleable than dogs, and would have been less compliant. Anyone who has owned a cat can testify that they are notoriously difficult to train.
But it's not merely a matter of humor or casual observation, but accepted scientific fact that what is true of one species of animal is not necessarily true of another - and that species are in fact quite different in their behavior. It would be utterly foolish to suggest that observations about the behavior of dogs can be applied to cats - yet professionals in the field of psychology seem to have little reluctance to assume it applies to human beings.
In fairness, there are some instances in which cats respond to conditioning. They clearly associate the sound of an electric can opener to the appearance of food, and with some effort a cat can be trained to respond to specific commands, when they are inclined. But a cat is not a dog, and cannot be expected to behave as one, and the same is true of humans.
Consumer Branding: Calling All Cats
Early marketers, inspired by Pavlov and Watson, sought to demonstrate that these results were applicable to human consumers - and given that they had a financial interest in convincing their own clients that they could drum up demand, the "proof" was presented in short order.
In fairness, there was tremendous growth in consumer demand, but there were many other factors in play: an increase in disposable income, improvements in logistics and distribution, the growing consumption of media, and other phenomena were all factors that could be linked to increased demand - but credit was claimed by advertisers and their pseudoscientific practices for the benefit.
The charade was unveiled, or at least it should have been, in the 1980s, when the other factors had leveled out (personal income was stabilizing, the roads and rails were fully developed, and media reached the point of saturation) and consumer demand followed. Instead, there was the insistence that the conditional model of advertising was fine, it simply needed to be louder and more frequent to stand out against the din.
Those firms who were more attentive to consumer behavior, however, realized that customers were more intelligent and discerning than previously believed - they are not like Pavlov's dog, and likely never had been.
If the behavior of human beings is to be analogized to that of an animal, then customers behavior falls more in line with cats - whose behavior sometimes seems predictable, but who more often stand aloof and are more discerning as to whether they wish to engage.
The emergence of technology has better enabled firms to monitor the behavior of customers - but it was not a panacea. Technology may evolve at an astounding pace, but the essential qualities of human behavior are not that transitory. That is, the tools we use to pursue the satisfaction of our needs become different over time, but our basic needs do not change.