Conditioning.
You may remember being ‘told off’ as a child. Perhaps you had a ‘naughty step’ for misbehaviour. You may also have been given pocket money as a reward for good behaviour. You were being ‘conditioned’.
In psychology books you’ll find references to ‘conditioning’ with well-known experiments involving animals, such as Pavlov’s dog (dog learns to salivate when it hears a bell) and the Skinner Box (rats learn that pushing a lever will release food). Similarly, my cat quickly learned to linger by the food bowl whenever I open the cat food cupboard. These are all examples of conditioning.
Humans, like animals, are also conditioned by everyday experiences. When you post content on social media, you quickly learn what sort of content your network likes. You receive positive gratification (‘likes’ or comments on your posts). If you are a prominent communicator, you might sometimes face criticism too. Either way, this feedback continues to condition you. In other words, you are always learning through experience.
As marketers, maybe you too can help to condition your customers. Simple rewards for loyal customers could help them to form habitual behaviours for example. Similarly, penalising bad behaviour can also affect long-term behaviour. If you are involved in social marketing, you might consider how you can implement fines or withdraw a service for those people who misuse it.
So, although examples of famous conditioning experiments might seem rather dated and unrelated to the modern human world, the principles they demonstrated are very much alive and kicking.
