Talk of Asian Marketing Show 63 Ice Cream's Classical Conditioning In Singapore
Channel: Chinese Consumer Connection
Date: 2011-03-26

Chinese Consumer Connection
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We are back in Singapore this week, with a classic impulse purchase--ice cream! It seems like every country has their own traditional ice cream music that gets fixed in memory from a young age. This is a perfect example of classical conditioning. When we travel to another culture, and the ice cream music is different, it just seems strange. In this episode, our crew looks at the bell ringing that every child and adult in Singapore knows.

We have all seen the Pavlov dog experiments but people often assume such fundamental associations between a stimulus and an expected event do not really happen in our everyday lives. Students often ask me what practical marketing application this theory has, since it seems to only work for dogs. In reality, classical conditioning is used far and wide in the marketing from many firms. An easy example is the smell produced at McDonald's when cooking their fries. That odor is pushed throughout the store servicescape and even into the outside area around the restaurant. The big yellow fries are associated with the smell and the consumption experience. Those fries are then placed up front in huge billboard adverts to associate a conditioned response. It all sounds a bit evil, but in this episode, we see how a simple bell is associated with ice cream for kids of all ages, and it seems a bit more innocent. Take a look at this week's video.