Marketing, the Figure-Ground Stimulus, and Values

Posted on 21. Jan, 2010 by Mark McKinney in Blog, Principles & Ideas, Reviews

Marketing, the Figure-Ground Stimulus, and Values, 100% based on 5 ratings

I recently read an interesting post by Seth Godin, talking about how he feels that marketing messages are analogous to comic book frames. The marketing message is the crafted communication much like the illustrated comic frame, but the “message” takes place between the frames, where the reader actively imagines the action.

His point: “Consumers are too smart for the frames. It’s the in-between frame stuff that matters. And yet marketers spend 103% of our time on the frames.”

I couldn’t agree more, and this led me to think about how people might fill in between the frames. I bet readers are familiar with Rubin’s Vase (see below). Do you see a vase, or do you see two people facing each other?

In psychology, we call this a “figure/ground stimulus.” Psychologists want to know if people see the vase as the figure and the white as the ground (background), or vice versa. In marketing, we might say that people are beginning to push the crafted communication – the frame – into the background, and that it is the imagined reality occurring between the frames that is the figure people focus upon.

So what do people imagine exists between the frames? Again, I turn to my background in psychology. What we know, based on attribution theory, is that we tend to attribute positive motives to people that are most like us. In imc² terms, I would suspect that people are attributing positive motives to brands that have high congruency with their values. Remember that we at imc² define trust as credibility (does the brand do what it says it will), care (does the brand care about my wants and needs), and congruency (does the brand stand for things I value). Brands with high congruency should be getting a lot of positive imaginings.

The kicker: Brands can only have congruency, and thus earn positive imaginings, if they are clear about what they value, and live those values authentically. As Godin said, “Consumers are far too smart for the frames.”

[Read Winning in the Relationship Era to further explore how leading brands will flourish in a new era of marketing.]

Tags: congruency, marketing, trust, values

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