How can Solomon Asch’s Conformity Experiment be applied to marketing (or what does it say about consumer culture)?

I’ve talked about this theory before, but I want to go back to it for this post. I want to look at it within a different realm and show you how it is used in marketing.

However, before I do that, here’s a recap of what the Asch Conformity experiment is and what it revealed about people.

The Asch Conformity Experiment

In 1951, a psychologist by the name of Solomon Asch conducted an experiment to investigate the powers of social pressure. To do this, he got 50 male participants to do a “vision test.” However, the tests were rigged. In every exam, there would be stooges who predetermined an answer to the test (and the answers were wrong the majority of the time).

When the experiment concluded, Asch found that the participants in the groups with stooges who gave wrong answers conformed 75 percent of the time. This means that the majority of them followed along with the group and gave wrong answers.

But this study isn’t perfect. It has been criticized for not looking at the full picture. Some critics have called out the Asch Conformity Experiment for not addressing other possible reasons for why participants conformed.

One reason that is often referred to is that participants didn’t want to cause conflict. Some of the subjects may have just agreed with the group so that they could prevent getting into arguments or disagreements.

How Can It be Applied to Marketing?

So how can this study be applied to marketing?

Well, since this experiment revealed that a lot of people will conform to group-thought, we can apply it to trends.

Trends and conformity are very similar. As a matter of fact, their meanings kinda overlap.

Trends are behaviours or things that people do or buy because a lot of other people are into it. Conformity is an act of doing what everyone else is doing.

I remember back in 2017ish (maybe later), there was this huge fad for fidget spinners. Every kid wanted one and nearly every kid had one. Having a fidget spinner was the trend back then.

So because of this, a bunch of toy companies started to mass-produce them. And they even went as far as creating different types of fidget toys. Everyone was hopping on this train. There were even some businesses that were giving free fidget spinners to promote their company because they knew every kid wanted one.

But this is just an example of how businesses used a trend to promote their company. If you want to look at a company that created a trend, that changed the culture, look at what Apple has done.

It’s because of them that everyone wants a smartphone. It’s because of them that more and more laptops are now either tablet-based or can be used as a tablet.

READ MORE: Psychology of Marketing

And they were able to do this by getting people to feel something about their products via great stories, and then getting those people to talk about the products, which encourages others to want them. Then these people talk about how awesome Apple’s products are, getting more people to desire them, thus creating a trend. As time goes by and more people have these products, new people will also want them, because, you know, conformity.

And that’s how Asch’s Conformity Experiment has been used in marketing.