The Presumption of a Virgin Mind

Lately, I'm unusually attuned the presumption by marketers that promotional or branding message is delivered to a virgin mind: that the audience will react to a message based on the content of that message alone, possibly with consideration of their present situation, but with no consideration of their past experience. It seems to me rather a dangerous omission.

It's often presumed that emotion precedes reason and follows perception, but emotion itself is not a mystical and inexplicable factor. Emotion is the result of experience. We do not methodically call to mind the precise details of every experience or impression we have had regarding a brand on each new encounter with it, as this would be inefficient; but instead, we have a general impression, a sense that is based on an amalgam of the strongest and most frequent elements. And in that way, the impression of the consumer when evaluating any new information is guided by the existing context provided by experience.

For the person who has never received a commercial message before, has no experience with a product category, and has no interaction with a given brand, it's likely the presumption of the virgin mind likely holds - their lack of previous experience leaves them without a context in which to interpret any new information.

But for most products and brands, such a person is unlikely to exist: past experience with the brand and product. Even in instances in which a person has no previous experience with a specific product or brand, they draw upon their experience with similar ones. If they have never tasted tangerine juice, their framework is translated from their experience of similar products (orange juice), expectations are set, emotions evoked, and the filters through which any new information will be interpreted are constructed.

As such, marketers are faced with introducing new information into an existing framework: whatever we say about a product or brand is compared to the stock of information in the mind of the subject, evaluated for whether it is consistent, and accepted or rejected on that basis.

To presume that no such framework exists, and that our messaging reaches a virgin mind that will not consider any previous experience, seems entirely naive or intentionally ignorant of factors that pose considerable risk to the present initiative.