Jean Pierre Lacroix is the Founder and President of Shikatani Lacroix Design and the author of the “ThinkBlink Manifesto”.
Is it better to appeal to a consumer’s head or to the heart?
Back in the mid-20th century, during the embryonic years of mass marketing, that question wasn’t even up for debate. Marketers automatically assumed that consumers wanted to see the facts first. So a brand had to prove through its advertising that the product was superior: “Here’s why our freezer is best”, backed by a set of functional claims (“Freezes twice as fast”), supported by scientific proof (“Independent lab tests show that…”). The copy-heavy ads were often illustrated with pictures of happy housewives swooning over the product.
At the time consumer behavioural research figured that people were inherently rational beings. As consumers, they absorbed the facts, mulled over the features and benefits, carefully weighed the competitive trade-offs, and then made a calculated decision to buy. They moved progressively along a linear path through the stages of Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action. Marketing messaging had to work hard at giving a potential buyer a clear and defensible “reason why” based on its “unique value”.
That theory was upended in the 1960s with the Creative Revolution in advertising, sparked by a counter-cultural uprising amongst young adults looking to break free from social conformism. To connect with this new, free-thinking generation brands had to become more culturally relevant. And the fast growing visual medium of TV forced advertisers to abandon hard sell copy in favour of more aspirational lifestyle imagery depicting “The Good Life”. In an era when all consumer products seemed to come off the same assembly line, advertisers tried to differentiate their brands by playing to people’s innate desires and emotions instead of playing up the functional utility of the products.
The creative breakthrough came in 1959 when Bill Bernbach’s agency DDB boldly launched the “Think Small” campaign for the newly arrived Volkswagen Beetle. The Beetle ads broke all the old rules of advertising: they were irreverent, tongue-in-cheek and self-deprecating. Their anti-establishment tone resonated with new car buyers who could identify with the renegade positioning. Buying a Beetle soon became a cultural statement. The campaign was so successful that it convinced the entire ad industry to pivot. This historical turning point was memorialized in an episode of Mad Men when Don Draper, listening to his creative team mock the minimalist ad design, says, “I don’t know what I hate about it the most—the ad or the car – but say what you want, love it or hate it, the fact remains we’ve been talking about this for the last 15 minutes.”
It took a while for behavioural psychology to catch up with the Creative Revolution’s recognition of emotion as a catalyst of consumer choice. The turning point came in 1980 when social psychologist Robert Zajonc published a paper called “Preferences Need No Inferences” in which he argued that people instinctively feel before they think. As consumers they make an instantaneous, emotional decision to buy, and then fall back on logic to rationalize that choice. Capture the heart first, he advised, and the mind will invariably follow.
Much later on, in 1994, the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, after clinically studying patients whose emotional parts of the brain had been damaged, concluded that people are incapable of making even the simplest of choices if they are deprived of their ability to feel emotion. In other words, people are mostly guided in the choices they make by gut instinct. They prefer to go with whatever decision feels right. His discovery was further validated by Daniel Kahneman who in his landmark book “Thinking, Fast and Slow” outlined two types of thinking: System 1, ruled by emotion, and System 2, driven by reason. He made the case that 90% of our decisions are driven by emotion.
These research findings confirmed for marketers that first impressions matter. If feelings do in fact trump thinking, then the job of brand advertising was to influence the emotions consumers feel in the moment. And, according to Jean-Pierre Lacroix, co-founder of Shikatani Lacroix Design (SLD), one of the world’s foremost design agencies, that moment occurs in the blink of an eye – what he calls the “Blink Factor” – the fractions of a second that a brand has to make an immediate and indelible impression through sensory cues. The trick, of course, is knowing which emotion to trigger.
Jean-Pierre founded his agency in 1991 along with his creative partner at the time Ed Shikatani. Today his client roster includes such powerhouse brands as PepsiCo, Kraft and Cineplex. The core philosophy of his agency centers around the idea of “ThinkBlink”, the major tenets of which he describes in his latest book, “The ThinkBlink Manifesto”. What makes his agency different from most design shops is that work on the visual assets only begins after a rigorous strategic analysis. That makes his agency more of a hybrid shop, specializing in full brand transformations by combining the traditional strategic work of a branding agency with what he calls “immersive experience design”.
I started by asking Jean Pierre what initially drew him into the graphic design profession.
Jean-Pierre Lacroix (JPL): The Air Force, yeah. Yeah. You know, it’s interesting. I grew up on an Air Force base. My dad was in the Air Force, Canadian Royal Air Force. And I always had an interest in flying, or aspiration, but my true passion, that obviously came out later in my life, was design and drawing. And so I was trying to decide what channel I should go, should I join ROTO [Regular Officer Training Plan] and get a degree in the military, or should I go to a college and get a design degree? And so I applied to both ROTO and Sheridan College and I said, I promised myself, whoever responded first would be the direction I was going to go in my career. And Sheridan College literally responded within weeks. And so I said, this is a sign that this is right for me. And actually, in hindsight, it was definitely right for me.
And so I, moved to Toronto from a farmhouse near Cornwall, to going from no city to big city. And went to Sheridan College in Oakville and graduated in 78. The professors had bets on me that I would actually graduate and I graduated top of my class. I actually won the Intercity paper award for best student. And I was one of the few students that year that actually got a job. And I got a job at 50 Fingers, a design firm that became Spencer Francey Peters. And I think they’re currently, I think their name is Trajectory. But we designed album covers for musicians and that was a lot of fun. And we did some crazy things. I remember shooting an artist underwater in a swimming pool to give it that sense of being in space and having the dive equipment and almost drowning the poor guy. But anyways, it was fun.
Stephen Shaw (SS): That must have been foundational for you, because I think about album covers, you’ve got to capture the essence of a brand, its music, it’s particular theme. That must have been a real learning experience for you.