Psychobabble?

Strolling blindly into the lounge of my house the other day, (as you do) I unwittingly found myself invading the company of my parents and their friends. Since it would have been rude to simply turn around and stroll right back out again, I quickly decided to stay for a little bit, even if it was awkwardly hovering in the doorway through lack of chair space. After the standard ‘hows my job going’ break into pseudo conversation however, I was left waiting for the all too familiar follow up question, ‘What did you do at Uni again?’.

And on this occasion of course, they didn’t disappoint.

I have found, over countless encounters such as these, that people tend to react to the notion of ‘Psychology’ in one of two ways – either intrigue and fascination or complete and total dismissal. Some might argue this to be two sides of the same, slight suspicion arousing coin; both requiring a lack of information on the subject, both also requiring some form of pre-judgement regarding its validity.

People still seem to view Psychology with a sense of mysticism and trickery rather than treating it as a science – which it is classified as. ‘Can you read my mind then?’ being a common, though no less annoying than the first time I heard it, example of public attitude. Other bug bears including such flippant comments as, ‘I am so OCD’ also doing nothing for the validation cause. Though the banes of my existence as a student of psychology is another story, rant, rage, controlled rage.

Moving back to the initial anecdote, the reaction to the revelation of my academic focus, on this occasion was one of total dismissal and skepticism. I could tell this by the immediate scoff and not so subtle eye roll of the asker… Observant one, me.

‘And what does that have to do with graphic design?’

Well, quite a lot actually.

Graphic design in advertising is about creating a response in the target audience. Whether that be evoking an emotional reaction, provoking a certain behaviour or consolidating a memory of the product – these are all things that are at the core of psychology. If you can understand why a certain response occurs, then you can engineer input to provoke that same response on cue.

A quick example; Did you know that enforcing an item purchase limit, advertised in the ‘proper’ way can actuallyincrease the average number of items purchased per customer?

By applying this thought process to the design and implementation of advertising we can create the real possibility of massively improving the effectiveness of any message you are trying to put across.

And in the end, isn’t that what every design agency strives to achieve?