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Let’s end the week on this Foodie Friday with some scientific evidence that support the notion that we eat with our eyes.  I know you’re all up for spending the weekend reading a scientific paper.  I’ve got one with the lightweight title of Visual-Gustatory Interaction: Orbitofrontal and Insular Cortices Mediate the Effect of High-Calorie Visual Food Cues on Taste Pleasantness which we can sum up pretty simply:

There is evidence that the mere viewing of food images activates taste-related brain areas and elicits expectations about the taste and hedonic aspects of the food .  This is not surprising because visual cues constitute a primary sensory input indicating the pre-ingestive availability and palatability of food.

Then again:

Notwithstanding, the sense of taste provides a major input for food perception.

So you can dazzle them with your presentation, but ultimately you need to deliver on the promise.  Which is pretty much the business point too.  To a certain extent, we can create anticipation through the careful use of visual presentation and we might even be able to get some folks to ignore the actual quality of what we deliver.  Over time, however, substance matters.

I suppose there is an analogy to be drawn between the food study (when we see delicious food, the part of the brain responsible for providing the feedback we interpret as yummy taste kicks in) and good-looking job candidates.  The study food study found that regardless of the actual quality of the food you eat afterward, your brain interprets it as tastier, more delicious food than you would if you didn’t see those images.  I wonder if attractive people get a break in hiring and performance evaluations?

Maybe, actually:

Employer callbacks to attractive men are significantly higher than to men with no picture and to plain-looking men, nearly doubling the latter group. Strikingly, attractive women do not enjoy the same beauty premium. In fact, women with no picture have a significantly higher rate of callbacks than attractive or plain-looking women.

That’s from a study last year.  I think we all like to believe that looks don’t matter when we judge an employee’s or vendor’s performance on the job but maybe the food study hints at the contrary?   Funny what we learn from food…

An item in this morning’s USA Today sports section caught my eye.  It tells the story of Yoenis Cespedes’ first home run and how he stood at the plate and admired it, only to get drilled (hit by a pitch for you non-sports fans) for showing up the pitcher in his next at bat.  Why?

As if absorbing a new language weren’t hard enough, the Cuban defector also has to learn baseball’s unwritten rules at the major league level.

And that’s today’s business point.  Most of us learn, over time, to speak the language of our customers.  As with the Cuban ball players learning English, it’s only part of the battle.  Of course, the marketing world is littered with companies not even advancing that far.  There are marketing tales that he symbols in Chinese that sound like “Coca Cola” mean “bite the wax tadpole” and we’ve all heard the story of the Chevy Nova being marketed under that name when in Spanish, “No Va” means “doesn’t go.”  Exaggerations or not, these examples make the point.

Assuming you have competent linguists someplace on the staff, learning the culture is a challenge.  While it’s most apparent when marketing internationally (and one might ask what in digital isn’t marketing internationally), a brand can trip over itself even at home.  Language is in part generational – very few under 30 have ever experienced a “broken record” so how do they know if they’re going on like one?   Somehow calling my 86-year-old father “dude” doesn’t quite work.  The cultural gap is deeper than just that word.  Frankly, I’m offended by ads showing people emailing or texting during meetings – a cultural thing, I know.  You consider that a product feature – I consider it rude.

We all get our turns at the plate and once in a while we hit one out of the park.  Cespedes’ experience is a good reminder that for every happy batter there is a miserable pitcher and we need to be sensitive to the unwritten rules of business to avoid a bad experience the next time around.