Hasta La Creative!

If you’re ever “lucky” enough to be part of a clinical trial for a proposed medication or treatment, you’ll be told that you’ll have a 50% chance of being administered the actual drug being tested, and a 50% chance that you’ll be receiving something that looks like the medication without the active chemical in it. You’ll simply take that pill you’re assigned, as a part of your routine each day, and make regular visits to a doctor to determine whether the condition you’re trying to affect is improving.

Clinical trials using control groups — half the patients get real medicine; half get a placebo — are usually set up as a “double-blind” test. Not only you, the patient, have no idea whether or not you’re receiving the actual treatment being tested; neither does the doctor who is performing the regular evaluation of your progress. These precautions are taken because, sometimes, the idea of receiving treatment can actually create physical — or, at a minimum, perceived — improvement. Even the doctor evaluating you isn’t immune to experimenter bias, and might “see” signs of improvement that aren’t actually there, if they believe you’re receiving some sort of treatment.

What’s baffling to me is that while we’re all aware we can be fooled by this placebo effect, we seldom apply our understanding of it to market research — especially as it pertains to creative or concept testing.

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