Feast your eyes on this! (digital marketing ideas)

Here’s a digital marketing idea for you. Food. You can make your audience happy just by mentioning food. The inner us loves food, and the key reason for this is that we haven’t evolved.

Say cheese!

As a species, we’ve spent an awfully long time having to search for our food – so when we see it, we react positively. Feeding is a basic instinct, and studies have shown that just seeing an image of delicious food stimulates the appetite by triggering a surge of ghrelin, the hormone that induces hunger (Duszka et al. 2020; Kreomer et al. 2013).

Petra Schüssler and her colleagues at the Max Planck Institute have found “that the release of ghrelin into the blood for the regulation of food consumption is also controlled by external factors. Our brain thereby processes these visual stimuli, and the physical processes that control our perception of appetite are triggered involuntarily” (Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, 2012).

When ghrelin is secreted from the stomach into the blood, it activates at least two distinct brain pathways involved in feeding: the homeostatic hypothalamus, which drives food intake, and the hedonic pathways, which affect our motivation for and anticipation of food.

“Think about a monkey looking for food … when they see food in the distance, dopamine is released, and that gets their attention, releases their reserve tank of energy, and motivates them to step forward. Each step toward the reward triggers more dopamine.” (Loretta Breuning, cited in Fleming, 2022)

When we see food, it gets our attention, makes us hungry, motivates us, and makes us happy.

Think gooey chocolate cake, think…

We also have emotional connections with food. We all build up associations with food over time, and that’s because of schemas – mental shortcuts that help the brain connect with specific outcomes. Your brain is trying to process around 11 million bits of information, but you’ll only be consciously aware of an estimated 50 (Britannica, 2016). For the brain to make quick decisions, it needs to build a network of associations and speedy connections. These are activated automatically.

Any familiar object has a set of associations built around it. So, suppose you were to see a picture of a succulent red apple. In that case, you may think of the crunch as you’re biting into it, associate it with good health, or think about an ice-cold cider on a hot sunny day or snacking on crisp apple slices at primary school.

The takeaway

Think about your brand and your demographic and feed them. For example, if “fresh” is one of your attributes, think about the foods you can pop into content that communicate “fresh”. Or, if you’re going for “comforting”, then choose a picture of something edible that will activate your audience’s schema and make them feel comfortable.

These references do not have to be thrust in front of people either; they can be in the background – your brain will find them!