As a marketer, are you ready for neuromarketing, the holy grail where science meets marketing to reveal the workings of the human mind, the ultima
te no-bullshit zone? For a moment, keep your prejudices and ‘learnings’ from your storied institutions in abeyance, and just fathom this.
Warnings, even gory pictorial ones, on cigarette packs actually encourages smokers to light up. Product placements in films hardly works. Fragrance and sound are more potent marketing tools than brand logos. Increasingly, rituals and religion is playing an important role in consumers’ buying behavior. Sorry to disappoint you ad folks, but sex in advertising doesn’t really work, says Martin Lindstrom in his seminal new book, buy.ology, How Everything We Believe About Why We Buy is Wrong.
It isn’t that big, street-smart global marketers haven’t known what works with their consumers. Only that in most cases their assumptions on why and how it works are wrong. For long marketers have broadly relied on just two tools to judge the efficacy of their marketing efforts—tracking sales and traditional market research of asking questions to consumers or observing them.
Nothing wrong with it, only that we know that consumers often don’t mean what they say, and sales audits merely reveals the market share dynamics, and “validates your victories and losses without really explaining why they’re happening,” as Paco Underhill, the celebrated retail anthropologist and author of Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping puts it in the foreword of buy.ology.
It took Lindstorm help of two thousand volunteers, two hundred researchers, ten professors and doctors, and the most sophisticated brain-scanning machines in the world—the functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) and the advanced version of the electroencephalograph which tracks rapid brain waves in real time—to conduct the most exhaustive neuromarketing experiment in history to uncover how our unconscious minds control our behaviour. buy.ology is the repository and the end of this “three-year-long, multimillion-dollar journey into the worlds of consumers, brands and science,” as Lindstrom, who describes himself as a global branding expert, puts it.
So why does warnings on cigarette packs fail to deter smokers? “Cigarette warnings—whether they informed smokers they were at risk of contracting emphysema, heart disease, or a host of other chronic conditions—had in fact stimulated an area of the smokers’ brain called the nucleus accumbens, otherwise known as “the craving spot”.
The statutory skull-and-bones warnings that the tobacco marketers grudgingly accepted in the West had infact become a “killer marketing tool” for the industry! Union Health Minister Anbumani Ramadoss, who has justifiably been at the forefront of anti-smoking movement in India, of late, has reason to pick up issue with Lindstrorm here!
There is no sure-fire way to sponsorship success, but knowing the rules of engagement may help here. Despite spending similar ad monies on Americ
an Idol, Coca-Cola and Ford walked out with very different results. Coke’s integral play in the programme’s storyline, vis-à-vis Ford’s traditional spot ads during commercial time, meant not just a better memory score for the brand, but critically for Ford, “watching a Coke-saturated show actually suppressed subjects’ memories of Ford ads.”
It seems fashion trends and fads go much deeper than simple desires. The concept of imitation—whether it is copying other consumers, brand ambassadors, even mannequins—is hardwired into our biology, and for good reasons.
Neuroscience points to the mimicking region of our brains—mirror neurons—that works in tandem with dopamine, one of brain’s pleasure chemicals. “Because consciously or not, we calculate purchases based on how they might bring us social status—and status is linked with reproductive success.” So whether it is cool gadgets like iPhones or luxury purchases in a slinky new Prada dress, all consumption is geared to our “need to attract a mate who could possibly carry our genetic line or providing for us for life”.
Coming back to cigarettes, Lindstrom’s experiments in subliminal messaging—visual, auditory, or any other sensory messages that register just below our level of conscious perception and can be detected only by our subconscious mind—provides more fodder for the anti-smoking lobby. Pushed against the wall on advertising and promotion, cigarette marketers have fast-forwarded to the future and employed underground tactics like logo-and-name free mnemonics like he Marlboro-red Ferrari, a camel riding off into a mountainous sunset et al.
The good news, for the tobacco marketers at least, is that it seems to be working better than traditional advertising! “Logo-free images associated with cigarettes, like the Ferrari and the sunset, triggered more craving among smokers than the logos or the images of cigarette packs themselves.” Speak of law of unintended consequences.
But why does subliminal cigarette advertising work? For one, since it’s devoid of any brand name and logo, the message is not construed as an ad and hence the smokers’ guard drops. And the tobacco industry’s “efforts to link ‘innocent images’—whether of the American West, purple silk, or sports car—with smoking in our subconscious minds have paid big time”.
In fact, taking the results of the cigarette experiment as a benchmark, Lindstorm even poses an existential question—is the logo-led marketing al
ready on life support, if not already dead? If cigarette makers can create stimuli powerful enough to replace traditional advertising, what stops other marketers to follow suit? A caveat here. Even though a majority of logos may be losing their power, “certain simple yet powerful icons are increasingly taking hold, creating an instant global language, or shorthand”. Think Apple’s bitten apple, McDonald’s Golden Arches, Nike’s swoosh.
Lindstorm’s most provocative research though was an inquiry into how the brain experiences religious beliefs and brands. And is there any commonality between the two? fMRI study on over 65 volunteers revealed that brain activity pattern was almost identical (not just similar) when people viewed images of strong brands (iPod, Harley-Davidson, Ferrari) as they did when they viewed religious images (the Pope, Virgin Mary, rosary beads, Mother Teresa and the Bible).
And it wasn’t that these volunteers were agnostic, but devouts who scored themselves seven (average for the group), on one-to-ten scale (ten being highest) on spirituality. “The results of the brain-study show that most successful products are the ones that have the most in common with religion ... a sense of belonging, a clear vision, power over enemies, sensory appeal, storytelling, grandeur, evangelism, symbols, mystery and rituals”.
In a visually overstimulated media environment—where logos saturate our every waking hour—the findings of buy.ology’s sight-and-smell experiment could be a godsend for marketers. “Odor activates many of the exact same brain regions as sight of a product.”
Smart marketers are already tacking on fragrance to products, like Samsung’s flagship store in New York which “smells like honeydew mellon, a light signature fragrance intended to relax consumers and put them in South Sea-island frame of mind—maybe so they don’t flinch at prices”.
And most supermarkets in the US and Europe now have bakeries close to the entrance to enable “the fragrance of just-baked bread signal freshness and evoke powerful feelings of comfort and domesticity” with shoppers to push them to a point where they discard their shopping lists and start picking up food products they had not even planned to buy.
This multi-sensory approach to marketing is being termed ‘Sensory Branding’—the term is even trade-marked. The right pairing of sensory inputs can work wonders for marketers—they can use fragrance to make you see and sound to smack you lips, all to their brand’s advantage.
But surprisingly, sensory ubiquity—like Nokia’s signature tone—may not necessarily be an unqualified brand asset. In an image-sound brain experiment, it was discovered that volunteers displayed a “across-the-board negative emotive response to Nokia’s famous ring,” even while the images of Nokia’s phones were rated favourably. “In short, Nokia’s ring tone was killing the brand.” But just why? Peering into part of the volunteers brain circuits that processes information about emotion, Lindstorm and his research partner Dr Calvert found that the respondents’ brain “connected the familiar sound with intrusion, disruption, and feeling of annoyance... (like) a romantic dinner or tropical vacation shattered by a phone call from a boss or a movie or yoga class ruined by the ill-timed ring of an unsilenced phone.”
Is there an ethical dimension to neuromarketing, of being abused to manipulate and subjugate the mind for commercial gains or political propaganda? As the discipline’s biggest researcher, Lindstrom doesn’t shy away from the question.
“I believe it is simply a tool, like a hammer. Yes, in the wrong hands a hammer can be used to bludgeon someone over the head, but that is not its purpose, and it doesn’t mean that hammers should be banned, or seized, or embargoed. The same is true for neuromarketing ... Because the more we know about why we fall prey to the tricks and tactics of advertisers, the biter we can defend ourselves against them.”
