Can CERs be a Marketing Stategy?
Some of you may be asking, "What in the heck is a CER?" CER stands for conditioned emotional response. It is simply classical conditioning of a highly emotional response, such as fear or pain to a previously neutral stimulus such as a blue light or sound of wind through the trees. It's why dogs become afraid of wind (a neutral event) if to them it predicts thunder (something they are afraid of).
The term was first used in the learning literature to describe response changes in a procedure called conditioned suppression. A rat was taught to press a bar for food until the behavior was stable, then a tone was sounded followed by a shock. The shock would cause a decrease in the lever pressing for food. After repeated presentations of tone and shock, the tone by itself would suppress the lever pressing, hence conditioned suppression. The delay in lever pressing was caused by fear, a conditioned emotional response.
Remember, classical conditioning is what Pavlov made familiar – because a light, and also a tone, predicted the presentation of food, his dogs began to salivate in response to the light and to the tone, before the food was presented. In CC an animal learns the association between events – one event predicts another.
Conditioned emotional responses don't have to involve fear or pain. You could condition other emotions such as pleasure. Classical counter conditioning often does this in an attempt to change the emotion associated with a stimulus, such as a puppy's fear of a vacuum cleaner. By pairing, many times, the vacuum with something that produces a pleasurable response, such as smearing peanut butter on the vacuum, the vacuum comes to be associated with the pleasure of eating and the fear diminishes.
Our video commentary is about a franchised company that is trying to create a "positive" CER to its brand that, because of the service it provides, typically has an unpleasant emotional reaction for most people. So their strategy is to pair their brand with something more pleasant. Do we think this will work?? Watch the video and see.
Want to know more about how pets and other animals learn?
Get our "How Fido Learns Best" 4CD set AND
the 2 disc set Using Counter Conditioning and Desensitization Effectively to Modify Behavior
WARNING – we explain learning principles in an easy to understand way, and we
GUARANTEE YOU will learn MUCH, but don't expect to listen to these programs as relaxation before bed!
Sphere: Related Content
