What do you feel when you see the famed half-eaten Apple logo? Do you find yourself painting? Composing poetry? Starting a rock band? No? Well, according to a study in next month’s Journal of Consumer Research, you should.
Why? Because apparently, the Apple logo — even subliminally — makes people more creative. Which is why we spent three hours staring blankly at an Apple ad before writing this blog and now, well, we can all agree that this is the War and Peace of bloggery.
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Yes, that’s right, according to the study, the Apple logo makes people more creative. The researchers gathered students as test subjects and exposed them to both overt and subliminal Apple and IBM logos. They then had them undergo an "unusual use test" where they asked them to do something creative with a brick. The number of suggestions and a rating of "creativity" per response was tallied and the results showed that, yes, the Apple logo made people more creative. Surprisingly, the IBM logo was found to make people hungrier, as half the bricks were eaten.
There’s a very important term in psychology, stating that: "Correlation does not mean causation." In other words, just because you’re looking at an Apple, doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve gotten more creative, it could be that you were just told to be creative and therefore pushed yourself to think harder, it could also depend on the individual student, their tastes, their jobs, their lives and so on.
Do we think it’s possible that the Apple logo pushes people to be creative? While the test results don’t exactly convince us, we can see how it’d be possible, as Apple is known for putting together a simply genius marketing campaign, there’s no reason why the glistening white of every product and every commercial they make wouldn’t push us, as people, to try and be as creative as them. It’s like an action film makes you feel violent or an adult film makes you want to become a pizza guy.
By the way, we don’t know who funded the study, but if we had to take a wild guess we’d say his last name starts with J, ends with S, and has an O and B somewhere in there.
