All in the mind

The past 12 months have been successful by any standards for Danish-born brand consultant, author and ad industry veteran, Martin Lindstrom. His fifth book, Buyology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy, was published in October 2008 and subsequently became a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller. In May of this year, meanwhile, he was listed as one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people of 2009.

Buyology focuses on the unconscious mind and its influence on how and what consumers buy. Lindstrom built up his material for the book by collaborating with researchers from Oxford on a three-year, US$7m neuromarketing study that used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and steady-state typography (SST) to scan the brains of over 2,000 consumers as they reacted to a range of marketing and advertising influences, including product placements, subliminal messaging, brand logos, health-and-safety warnings and product packaging. The results, according to Lindstrom, were startling and shed considerable light on why consumers are drawn to particular brands and products over others.

Lindstrom, who claims to have been in the advertising business since he was 12 and now works with many Fortune 100 organisations through his consultancy companies, Brand Sense and Buyology, first came to the idea of neuromarketing in 2003 when he read about brain-imaging tools and realised they might have an application for marketing.

He’s convinced that marketing needs to combine with science for greater understanding of the unconscious mind and how it impacts on buying decisions. “I believe that we’ve reached a level today where we really don’t know what works and what doesn’t,” he says. “We need to go back to square one and ask ourselves why communications worked so much better in the past. We also need to ask ourselves how important the non-conscious part of our behaviour is. From our research studies, we know that 85pc of the behaviours we do every day are non-conscious.” He points out, however, that the vast majority of marketing research is carried out on the conscious part of the brain.

“I’m trying to put question marks on the conventional way of building brands and doing marketing, and I’ve tried to do that with all of my previous books. This one is probably substantially more ground-breaking because it’s both incredibly controversial and also because it’s backed by such a big research study.”

As regards traditional market research, Lindstrom says he always believed that asking consumers was at least a good start. However, what people say is one thing, what they really feel is quite another, he says. It’s an issue that came up when he was working with Millward Brown, researching his previous book, Brand Sense. “I asked people what Coca-Cola smells like, or what the bottle feels like. When we asked those questions, people went blank. I realised that our vocabulary and our ability to detect and understand our senses is so weak today that we can’t express it. Quite often we have problems expressing anything when it comes to feelings.”

Lindstrom began looking at neuroscience as a way of understanding the brain and its signals. One of his first challenges, he says, was to ascertain that it actually works. He teamed up with FremantleMedia in the UK, which produces the TV show Quizmania. “It’s a nasty TV show where this girl is shouting about how much money you can win if you call in and guess something,” he explains. “Before releasing it in the US, they asked me if it would be a success or not. Because we wanted to test if neuromarketing would work, we showed the show to consumers and asked them if they liked it. Then we tested it using neuroscience.

“People could not stand the show when they watched it and had to fill out questionnaires. But when we scanned their brains, it showed they loved it. They did not like the show because from a rational point of view it’s ridiculous. However, the emotional part of the brain is so engaged that you keep watching it.”

When the show was broadcast, the ratings turned out to be on a par with the predictions from the neuroscience part of the research. “That was the first experiment I’m aware of in the world that was able to prove neuromarketing is pretty solid if it’s done right,” he says.

A sense of discovery

Through replicating one of the studies done in Brand Sense, Lindstrom and his researchers found that the most important factor when building brand is the sense of sound. “It’s then followed by the sense of smell and then by sight,” he says, adding that this is almost the opposite of findings based on qualitative research. “This is not to say that Millward Brown or the good folks there are doing a bad job. It’s just to say, if you look at the brain from those different angles, you get very different answers.

“Based on that, we learnt that the senses have an enormous influence. We learnt that the sense of sound creates an emotional engagement that is much stronger than the sense of sight. It activates all five sensory regions when you listen to something or smell something, whereas if you see something, it only activates one region in the brain.”

His research has convinced Lindstrom of the eventual demise of the logo. “We believe today that the role of the logo is essential in order to build brands,” he says. “However, the study shows that the role of the logo is diminishing. I think the logo is likely to die. I don’t need to tell you that there are probably millions of logos around the world and I’m ripping the carpet away on this.

“But the reason is very simple: a logo today has turned out to be a warning sign of a commercial message. The trend is that it will disappear and be replaced by other non-conscious signals – everything from the iPod’s white earplugs to Tiffany’s blue packaging, to the United Colours of Benetton photos, or whatever you can imagine.”

As an example of this trend, Lindstrom points to the continued success of the tobacco industry, despite the fact that advertising has been banned in most countries for many years. “If you look at Formula 1 today, you’ll see that most of the Ferrari cars have these funny red-coloured bar codes. That is the secret logo from Marlboro. There’s no logo, there’s no name on it.

“When we scanned consumers’ brains as they saw those barcodes, we saw that this is the most powerful way to make people want to smoke more. When they see this barcode they’re actually much more influenced than by anything else.

“We all know it’s not healthy to smoke, so when I see an ad for Marlboro, my guards go up. But when I’m looking at that racing car and I see that red colour and that barcode, in the non-conscious part of my brain the Pavlov effect will kick in. Because I, as a smoker, associate the colour and the barcodes with Marlboro, suddenly I feel a craving for cigarettes. Because the conscious part of my brain is not aware of this, it won’t kick in and tell me to stop. That’s why that type of communication is much more powerful than anything else.”

Lindstrom believes that the advertising ban has actually been an advantage to the tobacco industry, because it was forced to come up with new and more effective techniques. “When it comes to other categories we will see a similar trend,” he says.

Product placement and sponsorship are other areas that came under the microscope in the study. “We learnt that sponsorship doesn’t generally work,” says Lindstrom. “It works on some occasions when it’s done right, but in 95pc of the cases it’s done totally wrong.

The reason for this, he says, is that the brand appears out of context in most cases. He points to the James Bond film, Casino Royal, where Louis Vuitton paid for product placement. “I bet you can’t remember the scene or didn’t even know that it was in there,” he says. “But it is there when James Bond is running down the streets in Venice and he passes by a Louis Vuitton store. Seeing that, our brains say, ‘What the heck do James Bond and Louis Vuitton have to do with each other?’ and will delete it.”

Another example is Ford’s sponsorship of American Idol. “Again, the consumer will ask what a car has to do with a singing contest, and delete it. When we did scans around this, the brain literally deleted the Ford brand. And we found awareness of the brand was less after the show than before the show. We’d never seen that before. We learnt that product placement and sponsorship when done right are incredibly powerful, but that actually in most cases they help to almost delete the brand in the brain.”

Future trends

Neuromarketing will have a huge influence on product design and communications in the future, according to Lindstrom. “I’ve worked with this for four years and I’ve seen so many examples of brands and products that were predicted to be an absolute failure by qualitative research. When non-conscious research was done, typically the opposite answer was given and at the end of the day this showed to be right.”

He says, however, that qualitative or traditional research techniques will not and should not disappear. “It’s almost like a Venn diagram: you’ll have quantitative in one, qualitative in another and neuromarketing in the third, and they will have an overlapping centre. In some cases, it makes sense to use qualitative research techniques. It all depends on the context and the format of it.”

Market-research companies are moving towards this way of thinking, according to Lindstrom. “I would say that all of the major research companies in the world are flirting with it. More than four years ago when I contacted various research companies and asked them if they wanted to be a sponsor of the study, the main reply was, ‘We don’t want to do a Frankenstein’. That encouraged me even more.

“Traditional research companies have an enormous machine based on a format that they earn millions of dollars on and they’re very successful at doing. Right now, I’m basically putting a huge question mark on all of it. I’m not saying that what they’re doing is wrong because in many cases it’s fantastic. But I also think we need to realise that all the answers are not coming from that camp. So they need to change it, but it takes time.”

Brands and companies are increasingly interested in neuromarketing, he says. “Because Buyology has had such a big influence across the world, a lot of companies are now saying it’s not about if we want to do this, we have to do this. That’s the reason you’re seeing companies such as Google, Microsoft and Mercedes-Benz using neuromarketing. I would claim that close to 40pc of the Fortune 100 brands are now flirting with this thought.”

This article first appeared in Marketing Age magazine