Online Marketers Should Invest in the Aesthetic Experience
An aesthetic experience stirs activity in different regions in the brain, including areas associated with emotion, reward and decision-making. Importantly, the experience extends across multiple sensory modalities and happens to occur regardless of whether a person is viewing a painting, listening to music or admiring a perfectly constructed math equation. Remarkably, you can quantify the experience. Researchers across multiple studies directed subjects to view artwork and state the extent to which each image was considered beautiful – all while measuring activity in the brain. As Semir Zeki, Professor of Neuroaesthetics at University College London, observes, activity in a key area of the brain, the medial orbitofrontal cortex, was “proportional to the declared intensity of the aesthetic experience.” When it comes to viewing attractive faces, the experience becomes even more profound. In a 2019 study, Chatterjee demonstrated how an aesthetic experience can actually activate the motor parts of the brain to compel people to move physically towards attractive faces. In the study, a computer monitor displayed a number at the bottom of the screen and two numbers at the top. The task was simple. Click on the number that was closest to the number on the bottom. Simple enough, right? But to see if attractiveness affects motor behavior, the researchers paired the top numbers with faces, one attractive and the other unattractive. Incredibly, researchers discovered the mouse would drift toward the attractive face – even if the number was incorrect. In other words, the aesthetic response to an attractive face was so powerful that it affected hand movement!Science to Leverage Your Marketing - Key Takeways
As consider ways to amp up your marketing assets, note these 3 important takeaways:- The brain automatically responds to beauty
- Content marketing and graphics go hand in hand
- Science-backed marketing can be a boon to your business
