I had never heard of Martin before. We moved in different circles. Like a Pre-Raphaelite painting there is a glow that emanates from Martin as if he was destined to be on stage. No, not as a matinee idol, but as some god waif. The man exudes virtue. Close up, he is even more startling. But it was the start of a personal and professional friendship that has stretched across five continents. Laughter, discussion, mutual council—it has been a unique pleasure.
Martin spends three hundred nights a year on the road. Martin watches, listens, and processes. The bio on his Web site says he started his advertising career at age twelve.
I find that less interesting than the fact that at about the same age his parents pulled him out of school, hopped on a sailboat and went around the world. Martin says he still gets seasick and chooses to live in Sydney, which is about as far away from his native Denmark as you can get. In the world of learned discourse what is fun is finding yourself sharing opinions with people whose pathway to that point of view has been different from yours. In fact, I think companies should pay me for the privilege of putting their logo on my chest, not the other way around.
Through the end of the twentieth century merchants and marketers had two ways of examining the efficacy of their efforts. First was tracking sales. What are people buying and what can we ascertain from their purchase patterns?
I call it the view from the cash register. So they bought Jif peanut butter, even though Skippy was on sale. The second tool was the traditional market research process of asking questions.
We can stop people as they stroll down the concourse of the mall, we can call them up on the phone, we can invite them to a focus group or ask them to join an Internet panel.
I know from long experience that what people say they do and what they actually do are different. It does not mean that those two tools are not functional, just that they are limited. The problem was that we are better at collecting data than doing anything with it. In the nineties the offices of many market researchers were stacked with printouts, whether on television ratings and viewing, scanner data from sales research, or the results of thousands of phone interviews.
We learned that soccer moms between the ages of 28 and 32, driving late model minivans and living in small towns, prefer Jif two to one over Skippy. What do we do with the information? As one cynical friend suggested, we are looking to get beyond the so what, big deal, and what-can-I-do-with-this information test. Science and marketing have historically had a love-hate relationship.
In the s academicians ventured out of their ivory towers and began collaborating with advertising agencies. Making moms feel good about feeding their children Jell-O, or deconstructing why a sexy sports car in the front of the Ford dealership sold Plain Jane sedans off the back lot. Much of it was simple and logical.
Applying it was easy with three major television channels and roughly a dozen popular magazines. The relationship started unraveling when stuff just went wrong. In the fifties, in spite of the best brains and a very healthy marketing budget, the Edsel flopped. Thirty years later New Coke tanked. For the past three decades the science in market research was more about higher math than psychology.
Statistical relevance, sample size, standard deviation, Z-tests and T-tests and so on. The absolutes of math are somehow safer. I like to think that the modern market researcher is in the business of making his clients better gamblers by seeking to cut the odds. Call it a cross between scientist and crystal ball reader: someone fast enough to get it right and with enough gift of gab to tell a believable story.
This book is about the new confluence of medical knowledge and technology and marketing, where we add the ability to scan the brain as a way of understanding brain stimulations. What part of the brain reacts to the Coca-Cola logo? How do we understand what part of sex sells? From fishing villages in Japan to locked corporate boardrooms in Paris to a medical laboratory in Oxford, England, Martin has a treasure chest of fascinating insights to impart and stories to tell.
Will we be able to watch sexual stimulus migrate to different parts of the brain as procreation and pleasure get further unhooked? Which is why, each and every day, all of us are bombarded with dozens, if not hundreds, of messages from marketers and advertisers.
TV commercials. Highway billboards. Internet banner ads. Strip mall storefronts. Brands and information about brands are coming at us constantly, in full speed and from all directions.
Point is, our brains are constantly busy collecting and filtering information. Some bits of information will make it into long-term storage—in other words, memory—but most will become extraneous clutter, dispensed into oblivion. The process is unconscious and instantaneous, but it is going on every second of every minute of every day. So why did I take time out of my already time-starved schedule to launch the most extensive study of its kind ever conducted?
I realized that, to clumsily paraphrase my countryman Hamlet, something was rotten in the state of advertising. Too many products were tripping up, floundering, or barely even making it out of the starting gate. As a branding advisor, this nagged at me to the point of obsession. I wanted to find out why consumers were drawn to a particular brand of clothing, a certain make of car, or a particular type of shaving cream, shampoo, or chocolate bar.
The answer lay, I realized, somewhere in the brain. And I believed that if I could uncover it, it would not only help sculpt the future of advertising, it would also revolutionize the way all of us think and behave as consumers. No idea. I just did. Which is why I embarked on what would turn out to be a three-year-long, multimillion-dollar journey into the worlds of consumers, brands, and science.
It feels like the ultimate intrusion, a giant and sinister Peeping Tom, a pair of X-ray glasses peering into our innermost thoughts and feelings. Could it even, the organization asks in a petition sent to the U. Of course, as with any newborn technology, neuromarketing brings with it the potential for abuse, and with this comes an ethical responsibility. I believe it is simply a tool, like a hammer. The same is true for neuromarketing.
Sometime, in the faraway distant future, there may be people who use this tool in the wrong way. But my hope is the huge majority will wield this same instrument for good: to better understand ourselves—our wants, our drives, and our motivations—and use that knowledge for benevolent, and practical, purposes. My belief? Because the more we know about why we fall prey to the tricks and tactics of advertisers, the better we can defend ourselves against them.
And the more companies know about our subconscious needs and desires, the more useful, meaningful products they will bring to the market. Stuff that engages us emotionally, and that enhances our lives? Seen in this light, brain-scanning, used ethically, will end up benefiting us all. Imagine more products that earn more money and satisfy consumers at the same time. Until today, the only way companies have been able to understand what consumers want has been by observing or asking them directly.
Not anymore. Imagine neuromarketing as one of the three overlapping circles of a Venn diagram. Invented in , the Venn diagram was the creation of one John Venn, an English logician and philosopher from a no-nonsense Evangelical family.
Typically used in a branch of mathematics known as set theory, the Venn diagram shows all the possible relationships among various different sets of abstract objects. In other words, if one of the circles represented, say, men, while the other represented dark hair, and the third, mustaches, the overlapping region in the center would represent dark-haired men with mustaches.
But the good news is that understanding of how our unconscious minds drive our behavior is increasing; today, some of the top researchers around the globe are making major inroads into this fascinating science. At the end of the day, I see this book—based on the largest neuromarketing study of its kind—as my own contribution to this growing body of knowledge. Some of my findings may be questioned, and I welcome what I believe will result in an important dialogue.
Though nothing in science can ever be considered the final word, I believe Buyology is the beginning of a radical and intriguing exploration of why we buy. So I hope you enjoy it, learn from it, and come away from it with a better understanding of our Buyology—the multitude of subconscious forces that motivate us to buy. Barely noticing the rain and overcast skies, they clumped together outside the medical building in London, England, that houses the Centre for NeuroImaging Sciences.
Some were self-described social smokers—a cigarette in the morning, a second snuck in during lunch hour, maybe half-a-dozen more if they went out carousing with their friends at night.
Others confessed to being longtime two-pack-a-day addicts. All of them pledged their allegiance to a single brand, whether it was Marlboros or Camels. In between drags, they swapped lighters, matches, smoke rings, apprehensions: Will this hurt? George Orwell would love this. Do you think the machine will be able to read my mind?
Inside the building, the setting was, as befits a medical laboratory, antiseptic, no-nonsense, and soothingly soulless—all cool white corridors and flannel gray doors. As the study got under way I took a perch behind a wide glass window inside a cockpit-like control booth among a cluster of desks, digital equipment, three enormous computers, and a bunch of white-smocked researchers. As the most advanced brain-scanning technique available today, fMRI measures the magnetic properties of hemoglobin, the components in red blood cells that carry oxygen around the body.
You see, when a brain is operating on a specific task, it demands more fuel—mainly oxygen and glucose. So the harder a region of the brain is working, the greater its fuel consumption, and the greater the flow of oxygenated blood will be to that site. So during fMRI, when a portion of the brain is in use, that region will light up like a red-hot flare.
By tracking this activation, neuroscientists can determine what specific areas in the brain are working at any given time. Neuroscientists traditionally use this ton, SUV-sized instrument to diagnose tumors, strokes, joint injuries, and other medical conditions that frustrate the abilities of X-rays and CT scans. Neuropsychiatrists have found fMRI useful in shedding light on certain hard-to-treat psychiatric conditions, including psychosis, sociopathy, and bipolar illness.
Along with a similar sample of smokers in the United States, they were carefully chosen participants in a groundbreaking neuromarketing study who were helping me get to the bottom—or the brain—of a mystery that had been confounding health professionals, cigarette companies, and smokers and nonsmokers alike for decades.
Smoking causes fatal lung cancer. Smoking causes emphysema. Smoking while pregnant causes birth defects. Fairly straightforward stuff. Hard to argue with. And those are just the soft-pedaled American warnings. European cigarette makers place their warnings in coal-black, Magic Marker—thick frames, making them even harder to miss.
In Portugal, dwarfing the dromedary on Camel packs, are words even a kid could understand: Fumar Mata. Smoking kills. But nothing comes even close to the cigarette warnings from Canada, Thailand, Australia, Brazil—and soon the U. Fifty percent of the time that customers asked for cigarettes, he told me. With annual sales of 1. In the Western world, nicotine addiction still ranks as an enormous concern.
Smoking is the biggest killer in Spain today, with fifty thousand smoking-related deaths annually. In the U. Are smokers selectively blind to warning labels? Are they showing the world some giant act of bravado? Do they secretly believe they are immortal? Or do they know the health dangers and just not care? It was twenty-five times larger than any neuromarketing study ever before attempted. Using the most cutting-edge scientific tools available, it revealed the hidden truths behind how branding and marketing messages work on the human brain, how our truest selves react to stimuli at a level far deeper than conscious thought, and how our unconscious minds control our behavior usually the opposite of how we think we behave.
For example, does product placement really work? The answer, I found out, is a qualified no. How powerful are brand logos? Fragrance and sound are more potent than any logo alone. Yes, and it probably influenced what you picked up at the convenience store the other day. You bet, and increasingly so. What effect do disclaimers and health warnings have on us? Read on. Does sex in advertising work not really and how could it possibly get more explicit than it is now?
You just watch. And it employed two of the most sophisticated brainscanning instruments in the world: the fMRI and an advanced version of the electroencephalograph known as the SST, short for steady-state typography, which tracks rapid brain waves in real time.
The research team was overseen by Dr. And the results? The machine made a little ticking sound as the platform rose and locked into place. More pen-spinning. Her interview answers were clear enough, but now it was time to interview her brain. In, out, in again. A tic, a jiggle, a fidget, a grimace, body twitching—the slightest movement at all and the results can be compromised.
Wedding bands, bracelets, necklaces, nose rings, or tongue studs have to be taken off beforehand, as well. Marlene was in the scanner for a little over an hour.
We continued to perform brain scans on new subjects over the next month and a half. Five weeks later, the team leader, Dr. Calvert, presented me with the results. I was, to put it mildly, startled. Even Dr. In other words, all those gruesome photographs, government regulations, billions of dollars some countries had invested in nonsmoking campaigns, all amounted, at the end of a day, to, well, a big waste of money.
Calvert discovered once she analyzed the results further. When stimulated, the nucleus accumbens requires higher and higher doses to get its fix. In short, the fMRI results showed that cigarette warning labels not only failed to deter smoking, but by activating the nucleus accumbens, it appeared they actually encouraged smokers to light up.
Most of the smokers checked off yes when they were asked if warning labels worked—maybe because they thought it was the right answer, or what the researchers wanted to hear, or maybe because they felt guilty about what they knew smoking was doing to their health.
But as Dr. But her brain—the ultimate no-bullshit zone—had adamantly contradicted her. Just as our brains do to each one of us every single day. The results of the additional brain scan studies I carried out were just as provocative, fascinating, and controversial as the cigarette research project.
If I could help uncover the subconscious forces that stimulate our interest and ultimately cause us to open our wallets, the brain-scan study would be the most important three years of my life. The coffee you gulped down this morning. The bacon cheeseburger and French fries you ordered in last week. Your computer software. Your espresso machine. Your toothpaste.
Your dandruff shampoo. Your lip balm. Your underwear. As a branding expert and brand futurist meaning that the sum of my globe-hopping experience gives me a helicopter view of probable future consumer and advertising trends , businesses consider my colleagues and me something of a brand ambulance service, a crisis-intervention management team.
What makes it stand out? Are there any stories or rituals or mysteries consumers associate with it? If not, can we root around and find some? Smell, touch, sound? A gasp the cap makes when you unscrew it? A flirty pink straw?
At thirty-eight, I stand about five feet eight inches, and am blessed, or cursed, with an extremely young, boyish-looking face. So how did I find myself staring through a window into an antiseptic medical lab in a rain-soaked English university as one volunteer after another submitted to an fMRI brain scan?
By , it had become pretty clear to me that traditional research methods, like market research and focus groups, were no longer up to the task of finding out what consumers really think. Like Marlene and all those other smokers who said that cigarette warnings discouraged them from smoking, we may think we know why we do the things we do—but a much closer look into the brain tells us otherwise. Think about it. As human beings, we enjoy thinking of ourselves as a rational species.
We feed and clothe ourselves. We go to work. We remember to turn down the thermostat at night. We download music. We go to the gym. We handle crises—missed deadlines, a child falling off a bike, a friend getting sick, a parent dying, etc. If a partner or colleague accuses us of acting irrationally, we get a little offended. They might as well have just accused us of temporary insanity. But like it or not, all of us consistently engage in behavior for which we have no logical or clear-cut explanation.
This is truer than ever before in our stressed-out, technologically overwired world, where news of terrorist threats, political saber-rattling, fires, earthquakes, floods, violence, and assorted other disasters pelts us from the moment we turn on the morning news to the time we go to bed. For example, consider how much superstition governs our lives.
We knock on wood for luck. Does a briefcase count? A pencil? What about the floor? We cross our fingers for luck. Yet most of us continue to act on them, every day of our lives. Under stress or even when life is going along pretty well , people tend to say one thing while their behavior suggests something entirely different.
Needless to say, this spells disaster for the field of market research, which relies on consumers being accurate and honest. But 85 percent of the time our brains are on autopilot. The concept of brand-building has been around for close to a century.
Some, like the tobacco companies, are scarily smart. What causes us to choose one brand or product over another? What are shoppers really thinking? And since no one can come up with a decent answer to these questions, companies plow ahead using the same strategies and techniques as they always have. Marketers, for example, are still doing the same old stuff: quantitative research, which involves surveying lots and lots of volunteers about an idea, a concept, a product, or even a kind of packaging—followed by qualitative research, which turns a more intense spotlight on smaller focus groups handpicked from the same population.
But if those strategies still work, then why do eight out of ten new product launches fail within the first three months? In Japan, product launches fail a miserable 9. How can its marketers know what these terms mean to most of us? Tiny, barely perceptible factors can slant focus group responses. Or maybe the head of the research team reminded another woman of an ex-boyfriend who left her for her best friend and this okay, just maybe tainted her impression of the product.
Maybe they just all hated his nose. Point is, try putting these micro-emotions into words or writing them down in a roomful of strangers. So, if marketers want the naked truth—the truth, unplugged and uncensored, about what causes us to buy—they have to interview our brains. All of this is why, in , I became convinced that something was fundamentally wrong with the ways companies reached out to customers, to us.
Nor were they sure how to communicate in a way so that their products gripped our minds and hearts. Whether they were marketing cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, fast-food, cars, or pickles, no advertisers dared to stand out, or to try out anything remotely new or revolutionary. In terms of understanding the mind of the average consumer they were like Christopher Columbus in , gripping a torn, hand-drawn map as the wind picked up and his boat lurched and listed toward what might or might not be flat land.
It was time to throw everything up in the air, see where it landed, then start all over again. Which is where our brain-scanning study came in. A sharp drop later on, and the neurologist might infer the last thing in the world she wanted was a Smirnoffon-the-rocks. I was so excited by what I was reading I nearly rang the call button just so I could tell the steward. As I mentioned earlier, eight out of every ten products launched in the United States are destined to fail.
In , more than , new products debuted in stores globally, the equivalent of one new product release every three minutes. Margaret Thatcher was elected the leader of the conservative party in Great Britain. Color TV debuted in Australia. Bruce Springsteen came out with Born to Run. And executives at the Pepsi-Cola Company decided to roll out a heavily publicized experiment known as the Pepsi Challenge.
It was very simple. One cup contained Pepsi, the other Coke. The subjects were asked which one they preferred. More than half of the volunteers claimed to prefer the taste of Pepsi over Coke.
Hallelujah, right? So by all accounts, Pepsi should be trouncing Coke all across the world. It made no sense. In his best-seller, Blink, Malcolm Gladwell offers a partial interpretation.
He cites a former Pepsi new-product development executive, Carol Dollard, who explains the difference between taking a sip of a soft drink out of a cup and downing the entire can.
In a sip test, people tend to like the sweeter product—in this case Pepsi—but when they drink an entire can of the stuff, there always lurks the possibility of blood sugar—overkill. That, according to Gladwell, is why Pepsi prevailed in the taste test, but Coke continued to lead the market. Twenty-eight years after the original Pepsi Challenge, he revised the study, this time using fMRI to measure the brains of his sixty-seven study subjects.
First, he asked the volunteers whether they preferred Coke, Pepsi, or had no preference whatsoever. The results matched the findings of the original experiment almost exactly; more than half of the test subjects reported a marked preference for Pepsi.
Their brains did, too. Interesting, but not all that dramatic—until a fascinating finding showed up in the second stage of the experiment. This time around, Dr. Montague decided to let the test subjects know whether they were sampling Pepsi or Coke before they tasted it.
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Influence is good, half information, half perspective which is done in an entertaining way. There are much stronger resources for … Read more ».
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