Association: How vital is it?

“Wow, Tide ki safedi!!! Anything special in office?”

               My friend asked me while I was leaving for office today wearing my new plain while shirt. Something struck me, how easily he associated with Tide brand even when other brands are too promoting it with same “whitening power” positioning. May be, because; “Tide” did a good job of associating themselves with “whites” only.

                The Association is been basic funda in the human behavior. We tend to associate and co-relate the different ideas/things/events with each other. Actually how we correlate these together only decides how we will behave with it. 

                For example, let’s consider the addiction to Smoking, some people can easily loose the addiction while some try hard but still fail to do so. We blame this on the will power or extent of addiction. But if we see many of those who easily get reed of smoking, have associated smoking with fun, attitude or other non essential emotions. Whereas, those who associate the habit to sleep or tension or bowel movement or regular schedule or anything that is essentially influential, face difficulty in quitting the habit. Also if we see the de-addiction programs, they not only try to keep the patient away from smoking but also mentally reprogram and dissociate the habit from the influential emotions. Even the medical products like nicotine based chewing gums work on psychology of the patient, the patient feels he do not need to smoke to get the specific feeling. Or the other product from Pfizer blocks the feeling that smoker gets after smoking, thus loosing the association of feeling with smoking.

                So much is the influence of association on human behavior; it even influences the memory of the person. If we study any Memory Improvement Program(MIP), for what they charge like anything, are nothing but techniques in which we associate the numbers, names or anything else with each other so as to remember them better. The other things that are thought in the MIPs is to minimize the number of thoughts in mind, this is to minimize the confusions and jumble in associating and correlating the pictures, numbers, names, events or ideas.

                Thus, association is so commonly used by people without even realization that it is called “Common Sense”. Mumbai beaches are always associated with the Chat. Goa with booze, parties and vacations. BSNL with network problem. Pedelite with adhesives.

 This is why the association is a key to Branding of any product. In management schools, they teach many Marketing jargons and concepts, but the association is left as a very small part of it.  The association is hardly taught when it comes to sales, retail, IT marketing, and many other topics. Whereas if we keenly observe these fields we can understand very well how association can tremendously enhance the output.

Now the question arises, is really Association so much related to consumer behavior? and if yes, What we need to think here is how can design a syllabus or teaching technique so that it revolves around the center of Marketing i.e. Association.