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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
Goldberg stops the tape. "So you see," he says placidly. "With this sort of information, you're in a position to recommend some options to your clients that you otherwise might not have thought of."
During the question-and-answer session, the account planners pepper Goldberg with hostile questions. "To me, this is a little bit horrifying," says one woman. "I mean, this seems like '1984' to me. The whole notion of controlling people. Are there ethical issues you're concerned about?" "We're digging into areas that are not life-threatening to the respondent," Goldberg says soothingly. "We're just professionals, trying to get information about a problem."
"But what about the ethical issue of digging into people's backgrounds and minds for the purpose of selling products?" someone else asks. "I mean, the woman on that videotape seemed like she was having some sort of episode. And it just seems like you're raising these issues, and opening this whole can of worms that you don't know how to deal with."
Goldberg is unflustered. "This was a young lady, remembering a sad situation," he said. "But we then brought her back into the present time. There's no damage done to these people."
Not surprisingly, medical professionals who use hypnosis to treat patients are less than enthralled by these corporate-sponsored forays into the consumer unconscious. "Ordinarily, I wouldn't use hypnosis until I had developed a trusting relationship with a patient," says Dr. Sidney Rosen, a Manhattan-based psychiatrist who specializes in the use of hypnosis. "If you run into someone who is vulnerable, and you don't have any expertise to deal with that, you could precipitate a nervous breakdown." Rosen, a practicing hypnotist for 40 years, emphasizes that using hypnosis to regress a patient to a sad or traumatic time is a particularly delicate operation, requiring the utmost care and sensitivity. "There is a danger of stirring up some sort of depression or panic reaction," he says. "You have to use all sorts of orienting suggestions, re-orienting suggestions. You want to test them to make sure they're calm before they leave. If they're still anxious, you might even prescribe medication." Most importantly, he says, "you would hopefully recognize their vulnerability. You're not just going in there to get information."
But the ethical issues aren't the only problem with hypnosis as a marketing tool. The whole idea that putting people in a trance will reveal their true feelings about brands is highly questionable. "Forty years ago, we believed that hypnosis was a truth serum," Rosen says. "Now we know it's not a truth serum. People are very influencible. The hypnotized person wants to please the hypnotist. They respond to minimal cues from the hypnotist. And so people say things under hypnosis that are completely false."
It's an intriguing thought -- the fate of America's consumer brands resting on the dubious musings of a bunch of soporific focus group respondents. But if some marketers have their doubts about such subterranean forays, others are leaping confidently into the fray. As a lead strategist at Hal Riney & Partners, Mark Barden recently used hypnotized focus groups as part of a presentation to Starbucks. "One of the issues we'd come across in doing standard focus groups was that hip young people were down on Starbucks," he says. "But they weren't really very articulate or forthcoming in telling us why. All they would say is, 'It's corporate coffee, man.'" Intrigued, Barden probed deeper; but all he got was "posturing," he says. "What kept coming up was the usual stuff that had been in the media," he says. "'They're kicking out mom-and-pop coffee shops.' 'It's a shallow packaging of coffee culture.' 'There's one on every corner.' That kind of thing. And so we hit upon the idea, 'Why not hypnotize them?' That way we can dig down to the real objections."
So Barden brought in a hypnotist to take the slackers under. "It was interesting," he recalls. "He was asking them questions like, 'You're walking down the street. You see a Starbucks. You go into the Starbucks. You look around. What do you see?" The answer, Barden says, was an eye-opener. "We asked, 'Who are the customers?'" he recalls. "They described guys in suits in their 40s. 'Yuppies,' they said. We asked: 'Anyone in there like you?' 'No.' 'Are you sure? Look around.' 'No one,' they said. 'Just the guy behind the counter.'"
