The use of pseudoscience and experimentation as a persuasive resource in new advertising communication trends

Abstract

Over the years, advertising communication has sought to use creativity to differentiate products and brands; using all possible resources available and with no hesitation in absorbing techniques and methods from different disciplines for the symbolic creation of values and perceptions. With the technological changes and developments in the last 15 years, advertising communication has evolved substantially to adapt to the new media arising in the digital environment. Thus not only the media have transformed but, consubstantially, the means of communicating, objectives and ways have evolved. This scenario has led to the emergence of various, apparently antagonistic, advertising trends. We can see the rise in new vintage trends that recover what is artisan and handmade, while campaigns are developed with increasingly technological applications (bots and new artificial intelligence, for example). These include a great tendency towards scientific and pseudoscientific justification. This not only involves applying neuromarketing to sales environments, but rather recovering old product demonstrations with brand values or understanding the insights applied to a creative concept. Advertising creativity recovered old psychological experiments used in the ‘60s and ‘70s, such as the marshmallow experiment, applying them to new creative proposals in special actions. In this way, psychological and sociological advertising experiments find a new way of using the product “demonstration”, or a “scientific” argument for the purchase, creating a brand image or promoting a change in attitude. This text analyses the most representative examples of this recently extended practice in order to analyze their characteristics, conceptualization and audiovisual production, so as to better understand the mechanisms used by the advertising sector to persuade and convince about certain changes in attitude.