Why do we buy what we buy? Find out why some ads and jingles work and others don’t, and the role the subconscious plays in our marketing decisions.Leonard Lopate interviews Martin Lindstrom for the Leonard Lopate Show in New York. Aired the first time nation wide November 12th 2008 at 12.00 PM EST. Click the play button below to hear this interview. (If the media player does not show up below, click here to download and play the interview.)
NBC TODAY SHOW :
"I thought sex sells" says TODAY's Meredith Vieira...
Author Martin Lindstrom sits down with TODAY’s Meredith Vieira to talk about his new book, “Buyology: Truth and Lies About What We Buy,” which explains the scientific reasoning behind purchasing habits.
The most watched morning program in the U.S. goes live with the startling results revealed in Buyology. Watch Martin Lindstrom talk about some of the amazing discoveries from the world’s largest neuromarketing study discovering the truth and lies about why we buy.
THE TODAY SHOW was broadcast live from New York 8:37AM EST on October 20th 2008. Lindstrom will return to Weekend TODAY - this Saturday 25th October 2008 at 9.00AM EST.
NEWSWEEK:
Forgive Me, Pepsi, For I Have Sinned
Buyology is a page turner writes NEWSWEEK’s Lisa Miller. Why do you choose Coke over Pepsi, Corona over Bud, Crest over Colgate? You don't think much about these choices, you say; your gut decides. Marketing guru Martin Lindstrom says otherwise.
Your preference for Macs over PCs is embedded in your brain circuitry. In "Buyology," he shares the results of a three-year, $7 million study, in which he submitted 2,000 people to fMRI scans to explore what, exactly, happens in your brain to make you stand in line all night for an iPhone.
The idea: People lie; brain images don't. To create successful brands, companies need to learn what people really want, not what they say they want.
The evidence: Lindstrom tested smokers, some of whom said they heeded the health warnings on cigarette packages. According to fMRI tests, the warnings did not dampen cravings; in fact, they stimulated them.
There's a religious aspect to these brain connections, too. The same areas of the brain "lit up" when people looked at religious symbols—the Virgin Mary, for example—as when they looked at strong brands, like the iPod. Weak brands generated less brain activity.
The conclusion: The most successful brands (Nike, Harley-Davidson) stimulate the brain's emotional centers in a positive way—a lot like religion. They create community, rituals and a common adversary. Coke Zero, says Lindstrom, succeeds because it poses as an enemy to its sugary sibling, Coke.
NEWSWEEK (U.S. edition) On stand October 27th 2008
Wall Street Journal:
Science Comes to Selling
Once upon a time, the advertising industry treated consumers as a bundle of personality traits (flirtatiousness, prudence, vanity) and products as a bundle of materials (distilled spirits, oils, dyes) put together by factories and laboratories. In short, consumers were people, and products were objects that advertisers tried to present to people in an attractive way. In the 1960s-vintage advertising world conjured up each week on TV's "Mad Men," the holy grail is to hit on slogans like "Bethlehem Steel is the backbone of America" or "Mark Your Man" for a lipstick campaign.
Today's world of marketing, however, reverses this arrangement. Marketers treat commodities as if they were people, with personality traits, and consumers as objects, with attributes that can be technically engineered. Nowhere is this trend more evident than in "neuromarketing," a burgeoning field that Martin Lindstrom explores with impressive clarity -- if undue complacency -- in "Buyology."
Marketers, using magnetic resonance imaging scanners, record brain activity in minute detail, measuring how the products they are selling affect the brain's pleasure centers. Daimler-Chrysler, to take one of Mr. Lindstrom's examples, showed pictures of cars to consumers while using MRIs to study the chemical changes in their brains.
Unexpectedly, when an image of a Mini Cooper passed before their eyes, a "back area of the brain that responds to faces came alive." Turns out it wasn't the Mini Cooper's "ultra rigid body" or "1.6L 16-valve alloy engine" that attracted consumers; it was its irresistible face. "You just wanted to pinch its little fat metallic cheeks," Mr. Lindstrom observes, "and drive away."
Or take another example. Some consumers who prefer Pepsi to Coke when they take a blind taste test, Mr. Lindstrom reports, prefer Coke to Pepsi when they know what they're drinking. A recent MRI test of 67 subjects explains why. Drinking Coke more significantly increases blood flow in the medial prefrontal cortex because its ad campaigns, over the years, have so effectively associated Coke with sensations of warmth, security and childhood innocence. Years ago, Revlon founder Charles Revson drily observed that "in the factory, we make perfume; in the store we sell hope." He was thinking, of course, of the romantic possibilities that Revlon's ads linked with its product. Neuromarketing can now pinpoint where in our brain such hope is triggered and tell a marketer which ad campaign will send the most blood there.
Of course, ad agencies have known for some time that commodities could be marketed as if they were people. By means of a clever campaign, a car or a beer or a chocolate bar can attach itself, in the mind of the consumer, to scenes of rugged adventure or romantic conquest. The buyer, by consuming the product, fills his need not only for a smooth ride or a mellow taste but, transiently, for the heady feeling of bold action or seductive prowess that was once available only through, well, actual experience.
But things have become more complicated. Engineers jostle to see how many needs can be met by a single commodity, such as an iPhone, and advertisers explore how many commodities can be marketed to satisfy a particular need, such as the need to feel like Michael Jordan, who in his prime endorsed everything from breakfast cereals to sports drinks. Neuromarketing takes the project a step further. By tracking brain response, it treats consumers themselves as objects: bundles of nerve centers that respond to different kinds of stimulus and form triggerable pathways as a result.
Mr. Lindstrom sees neuromarketing as a potential generator of vast consumer satisfaction. Aware, though, that the basic idea is unnerving -- there is a "brave new world" aura to such scientific manipulation -- he is keen to show how it sidesteps the ethical critiques that usually beset advertising.
In the old days, marketers were accused of "puffery": purveying falsehoods about the traits of the products they sold, as when Listerine claimed to prevent colds. But when neuromarketers attach personal traits to products, they are not falsely claiming that, say, a Mini Cooper actually is a "gleaming little person." What they are doing is adding a personality of warmth and fuzziness to the car, in the same way that the factory might add ventilated front disc brakes or cruise control. When you drive it, you will genuinely experience the sense of endearment that you might feel when surrounded by adorable children. Sure, it doesn't always work. But the intent is not to deceive.
Similarly, in the old days, marketers were chided for creating false consumer needs: e.g., encouraging the very status anxieties that products would supposedly allay. Think barbecues the size of SUVs. But neuromarketing gets at some kind of objective truth about consumers: about what really gives them pleasure. It makes its pitch directly to needs rooted in the brain's physiology, Mr. Lindstrom says, and so appeals to "our truest selves."
Let us grant that Mr. Lindstrom is right: that neuromarketing avoids portraying a commodity as the kind of object it really is not or encouraging an individual to be the kind of person he really is not. To borrow a couple of terms from the literary critic Lionel Trilling, neuromarketing does not participate in a culture of "insincerity." But it does seem to foster a culture of "inauthenticity": It disrupts identity itself by bypassing the conscious mind and targeting aspects of the self over which none of us has control. By coupling advertising's tendency to humanize commodities and commodify humans, it joins other forces working to erode the authentically human. It fits right in with disturbing contemporary trends, such as the tendency for Internet game-addicts to treat online avatars as more fully human than their own spouses or children. "Mad Men" is a lightly cynical prime-time soap opera. By contrast, "Neuro-Marketing Men," opening in the not-too-distant future at a theater near you, might just be a horror flick. Mr. Stark is the author of "The Limits of Medicine" (Cambridge, 2006).
This edition of Wall Street Journal was published on 22nd October 2008
Public Radio :
Marketplace Interview
Marketing expert Martin Lindstrom says stores have special ways to get shopppers to spend. Kai Ryssdal gets him to reveal some of their methods.
Click the play button below to hear this interview. (If the media player does not show up below, click here to download and play the interview.)
ABC NEWS:
The Science Behind Selling
T.J. Winick from ABC News questions Martin Lindstrom on subliminal advertising and the true power of sex in ads. Watch the latest interview with Martin Lindstrom live from New York on October 22nd 2008 at 4.06PM EST.
TIME:
Rosary Beads and Red Bull - anything in common?
Buy•ology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy By Martin Lindstrom Doubleday; 240 pages
What do Rosary Beads and Red Bull have in common? A lot, it seems. Marketing guru Lindstrom and his team hooked up 65 people to special MRI machines to find out what their brains revealed about the connection between religion and brand loyalty.
For days, the researchers ran images - like those of the Pope and a bottle of Coca-Cola--by the wired subjects. The resulting brain scans were arresting. It turns out that there is virtually no difference between the way the brain reacts to religious icons or figures and powerful brands. Nike is a goddess, after all.
The experiment is quintessential Lindstrom. The author, who spends 300 days a year on the road, teaching major companies how to market their brands, has an original, inquisitive mind. His new book is a fascinating look at how consumers perceive logos, ads, commercials, brands and products. Lindstrom conducted a three-year, $7 million neuromarketing study (sponsored by GlaxoSmithKline and Bertelsmann, among others) that measured the brain activity of 2,000 volunteers from around the world. Some of the results confirmed marketing-industry hunches; others flew in the face of conventional wisdom.
A few findings from the well-traveled savant:
• Product placement on the TV or movie screen is generally useless (unless you are selling it). Viewers tune it out like white noise. It works only when the product is fundamental to the story line.
• Cigarette warning labels not only do not deter smoking but actually encourage smokers to light up. The reason? The nucleus accumbens, or the "craving spot" in the brain, is stimulated by the sight of the warning.
• Is subliminal advertising still used? You bet. There are even stores that play music containing concealed recorded messages prodding shoppers to buy more or not to shoplift.
• Contrary to popular belief, sex usually doesn't sell products. But controversies about sex in ads do (see Calvin Klein or Abercrombie & Fitch).
The author insists he doesn't study buyology, which he defines as "the multitude of subconscious forces that motivate us to buy," to help companies launch nefarious marketing schemes. Rather, he says, "my hope is that 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." Well, maybe. But then again, he has nothing to sell us.
TIME published 23rd October at 5.00 PM EST. Time on stand October 28th 2008.
New York Times:
Buyology hits top best-seller lists...
Monday 10th November 2008 Lindstrom's Buyology hit two of the world’s leading best-seller lists: The New York Times Best-seller list as well as the Wall Street Journal Best-seller list.
As per November 10th 2008 Buyology ranked number 3 on the Wall Street Journal list and as per November 16th 2008 Buyology ranked number 11 on The New York Times list.
As per November 5th Buyology as well hit number 2 on Amazon.com - the worlds leading online book-seller. Buyology as well hit several other best-selling lists including USAToday’s best-selling list and Publishers Weekly’s best-seller list.
USAToday:
'Buyology' offers a peek inside buyers' heads
Picture a mad scientist in his laboratory, cackling with glee as he tries to unlock the secrets of the human mind. Now, consider the unsettling possibility that the scientist may be on to something. Marketing expert Martin Lindstrom is that scientist, caught up in the excitement of research in his new book, Buyology. Lindstrom first became aware of neurological marketing research through a Forbes magazine article, "In Search of the Buy Button."
The article discussed a lab in England, where a neuroscientist teamed with a market researcher to scan the brainwaves of subjects watching commercials. Lindstrom was thrilled that unbiased access to the consumer brain was finally available.
A difficulty of standard marketing research, Lindstrom says, is that people will not — or cannot — provide accurate information about their mental states.
When asked why they prefer a brand of soft drink, or how a warning label affects them, most people cannot give a straight answer. This, Lindstrom says, is the great advantage of brain waves.
FIND MORE STORIES IN: United States | England | American Idol | Forbes | FedEx | Corona | Guinness | Reese | Casino Royale | Search | Pieces | fMRI | Martin Lindstrom | Magnetic Resonance Imaging "They don't waver, hold back, equivocate, cave in to peer pressure, conceal their vanity, or say what they think the person across the table wants to hear. … Neuroimaging could uncover truths that a half-century of market research, focus groups and opinion polling couldn't come close to accomplishing."
Two technologies were used in Lindstrom's studies: SST (Steady State Topography) and fMRI (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging). In a series of tests spanning three years and more than 2,000 subjects, he concluded:
•Warning labels on cigarettes don't work. They stimulate activity in the part of a smoker's brain linked to cravings.
•Traditional advertisements no longer create lasting impressions. By age 66, most people with a TV will have seen nearly 2 million commercials. That makes it hard for an ad to increase a viewer's memory of a brand, despite the millions spent.
•Product placement only works when fully integrated. It works when Coke-bottle-shaped furniture is part of the set design on American Idol, for example, or when Reese's Pieces candy was used for bait in the movie E.T. However, when a product is not integrated, such as FedEx packages appearing in the background of Casino Royale, there is no measurable effect with regard to viewer recollection of brand.
•Sex sells itself. Viewers of sexually suggestive ads did pay attention, but more to the sex than the ad. In one study, fewer than 1-in-10 men who saw a sexually suggestive ad could recall the product, while twice as many remembered the product in non-sexually suggestive ads.
•Successful branding functions like religion. Simple rituals, such as putting a lime wedge in a Corona or slowly pouring a Guinness, give the brand added cachet. Brands attract zealous followers — "I'm a Mac; I'm a PC." Scans using fMRI technology showed that some viewers had the same neurological response to strong brands that they did to religious iconography.
•Subliminal advertising can be highly effective. When watching an advertisement, viewers automatically raise their guard against its message. With subliminal advertisements, viewers' guards are down, so their responses are more direct.
•Marketing isn't restricted to the visual. Many companies use smells to sell products. Fast-food restaurants and supermarket bakeries use artificial fresh-cooked food smells. Sounds also effect buying. A study showed shoppers purchased French or German wine depending on which nationality's music was playing on store speakers.
Lindstrom's research should be of interest to any company launching a new product or brand. "Eight out of 10 products launched in the United States are destined to fail," Lindstrom writes. "Roughly 21,000 new brands are introduced worldwide per year, yet history tells us that more than 90% of them are gone from the shelf a year later."
It's likely that the information in this book will be used in future marketing campaigns, so even if you aren't in the marketing business, it's a worthwhile read as a measure of self-awareness and self-defense.
USAToday on stand October 27th 2008 worldwide
BBC Focus:
Dr. Paul Parsons: "I'll review everything I buy from now on."
Buyology is the latest in a clutch of titles examining “econo-science” that also includes the bestsellers Freakonomics, Blink and The Long Tail.
Like these, Lindstrom brings together a great many strands of research to build a fascinating case. The writing is snappy and the book’s a page turner.
BBC Focus Magazine. On Stand November 1st 2008.
Spectator:
Hi-Tech Brainstorming
Consumers are a difficult bunch. They say one thing but mean another. Asking consumers what they think of your new product or service or brand will not always elicit an honest response. As a result, of the 75,000 products that are launched each year, only 10 per cent will still be on the shelves the following year.
Business has always been about taking risks, but who would say no to improving the odds of their brand lasting more than a year? The problem is that focus groups – the usual method of shortening the odds – are flawed. There are often complex dynamics at work in these groups. Some people will try to dominate the conversation and some will be submissive. The product sitting on the table is just a sideshow. As a result, even big companies with massive marketing budgets sometimes get it wrong. Remember Maxwell House’s ready-to-drink coffee? Or Harley Davidson perfume? Me neither.
To figure out what consumers really like (and dislike), marketers need to see inside their minds – literally. With the advent of powerful brain-scanning technology, such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), this is becoming possible. By measuring the flow of oxygenated haemoglobin in the brain, neuroscientists can pinpoint areas of brain activity to the nearest millimetre.
Marketers were keen to recruit this new medical tool to help them find out what consumers think. Never mind what consumers tell us they like, let’s see what they really like. The field that emerged was called neuromarketing. Given its Orwellian overtones, few companies admitted to using it as a marketing tool. But things might be about to change.
Danish-American marketing guru Martin Lindstrom has conducted the biggest neuromarketing study to date, involving 2,081 volunteers from America, England, Germany, Japan and China. He managed to convince eight multinational companies to stump up $7 million for his experiment. The results of this fascinating study can be found in Lindstrom’s latest book: Buy-ology: How everything we believe about why we buy is wrong.
Lindstrom had a number of questions he wanted answers to. Do cigarette warning labels work? Does product placement work? Is there a strong similarity between brands, rituals and religion? Does subliminal advertising work? Does sex in advertising work? The experiments provided answers to each of these questions.
Let’s look at subliminal advertising. The first purported case was in 1957. During a screening of the film Picnic, an American market researcher, James Vicary, projected the words ‘Drink Coca Cola’ and ‘Eat Popcorn’ on to the screen for a fraction of a second. The duration of the image was so infinitesimal it could only be picked up subconsciously. During the intermission, the sale of Coke and popcorn rocketed. It appeared that by appealing directly to the subconscious, marketers could change people’s behaviour. No sooner had the results of the experiment been announced, than there was an outcry about this sinister new form of advertising. Within a year, the American National Association of Broadcasters banned subliminal advertising. The British and Australian regulators followed suit. But a few years later, Vicary admitted that the whole thing had been a hoax. He had never conducted such an experiment.
However, genuine studies have shown that subliminal messages do have an impact on our subconscious. A Harvard University experiment, conducted in 1999, showed that simply flashing the words ‘wise, astute and accomplished’ on a computer screen (while playing a computer game) to one group of senior citizens, and the words senile, dependent and diseased to second group, affected the way the volunteers subsequently walked.
Lindstrom’s experiment concerned smoking. He wanted to know if subliminal images that are associated with certain cigarette brands (cowboy boots, deserts, sunsets) had the same influence on smokers as overt branding, such as Joe Camel and the Marlboro Man. The fMRI study showed that those viewing the overt cigarette imagery showed activity in an area of the brain, the nucleus accumbens, associated with reward, craving and addiction. What was surprising, though, was that the volunteers who only saw the images of cowboys on horseback, desert sunsets, and so on, showed more activity in the same brain region. In other words, the subliminal images created more craving for cigarettes than the overt images. Of course, with the ban on cigarette advertising, most tobacco companies now use this subtler, far more effective form of advertising. For example, Philip Morris, owners of the Marlboro brand, offer financial incentives to bar owners to fill their bars with furniture and fixtures that are redolent of Marlboro. Ever wondered why you had the sudden urge to light up after sitting on that red sofa, while a cowboy film played on the screen overhead? Now you know why.
Unsurprisingly, most people find the idea of marketers knowing our minds better than we do a bit creepy. However, tracing the oxygen flow in a person’s brain is not the same as reading their thoughts. Neuromarketing will never locate the ‘buy button’ in the brain, but it will shed insight into why some marketing techniques work and why some don’t. And Martin Lindstrom is the perfect guide to the new science of ‘buy-ology’. Be prepared to have your cherished beliefs overturned.
Appeared in SPECTATOR (UK) on Tuesday, 28th October 2008
Advertising Age:
Anti-Smoking Warnings Make You Want to Smoke, Claims Study
New Book From Martin Lindstrom Explores How Subconscious Affects Buying Decisions.
In a bound-to-be-controversial book released today, ad-industry pundit Martin Lindstrom busts commonly held beliefs about marketing, asserting that subliminal advertising does exist and maintaining that cigarette warning labels make consumers want to smoke more, not less.
A major finding in Lindstrom's 'Buyology' is that consumers are driven by not only conscious motivations, but subconscious ones, too.
"Buyology: Truth and Lies About What We Buy," published by Doubleday, lays out the findings of a three-year, $7 million neuromarketing study by Mr. Lindstrom, who is chairman-CEO of Lindstrom Co. He and a team of researchers in Oxford, England, used the most up-to-date neurotechnologies -- functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and electroencephalography (EEG) -- on 2,000 people from five countries in an effort to better understand consumer behavior. The goal was to gauge the efficacy of product health warnings, product placement and subliminal messaging, among other things.
Beyond rational choice A major finding is that consumers are driven by not only conscious motivations, but subconscious ones, too. "The majority of the decisions we make every day are basically taking place in the part of the brain where we're not even aware of it," Mr. Lindstrom said. "I really wanted to find out what makes one brand appeal to us. You really can't ask that question to the conscious mind and depend on a verbal answer."
But you can depend on the brain, he said, maintaining that's why neuromarketing, or the study of how the brain responds to marketing stimuli, is here to stay.
Mr. Lindstrom said one of the most surprising findings of the study involved warning labels placed on cigarette packs. When project researchers asked test subjects if the warning labels worked, most said "yes." These were the subjects' conscious answers. But their subconscious answers told a different story. When researchers repeated the same question and flashed images of the labels while subjects underwent an fMRI, the images activated "craving spots" in the brain, indicating that the warnings made the smokers want to smoke more, not less.
In a different study, researchers found that anti-smoking ads had the same counterintuitive effect.
Counterintuive claims "Buyology" also says that a brand's logo is not as important as many have held it to be; that consumers' sense of sound and smell are more powerful than their sense of sight; and that product placement doesn't always work. For example, when Mr. Lindstrom's researchers analyzed product placements in "American Idol," they found that Coca-Cola was far more effective at captivating consumers than Ford Motor Co., even though the corporations similarly paid more than $26 million on their campaigns.
The reason: The Coke label and colors were continually seen while Ford, which sponsored videos on the show, was less visible and less integrated into the action.
Mr. Lindstrom anticipates that his book will be greeted with mixed reviews. He realizes that people are scared about using neuromarketing, but remains convinced that it can be used in an ethical way. "Neuromarketing is like a hammer," he said. "It depends on whose hand you use and how you use it. You can use it to destroy or hang up a beautiful painting on the wall."
The Advertising Research Foundation declined to comment until it had time to review the book.
Published 21st October 2008.
CNBC:
Why Do We Buy? New Book Unlocks The Scientific Truth
For years marketers and experts have tried to figure out why we buy what we buy. They’ve spent billions on research, focus groups and advertising trying to find that special “button” of ours they could push to get us to part with our cash.
Now there is a fascinating new book that explains the actual science of why we buy things.
Martin Lindstrom’s book, “BUYOLOGY Truth and Lies About Why We Buy” shatters conventional wisdom and tells us why we really buy certain products or why we’re loyal to certain brands. Lindstrom partnered with researchers at Oxford University to launch the largest neuro-marketing study ever conducted to find out how our unconscious minds influence our buying decisions. At a cost of more than seven million dollars the team monitored more than 2,000 people from all over the world to see how their brains reacted to such things like product placements, subliminal messaging, brand logos, safety warnings and sexy or provocative packaging.
I wanted to know if Lindstrom could apply any of the findings to help explain what is going on right now in the investor’s mind.
Click here to view the CNBC interview with Martin Lindstrom.
First published October 20th 2008 at 4.10PM EST.
CNET:
Apple (and its branding) like a religion
It's something that has been talked about for years, and now the author of a new book is trying to explain it: the idea that to many people, Apple is a religion.
In an interview with the creators of the film MacHeads, which itself examines the Apple branding and community phenomena, Buyology author Martin Lindstrom (see video below) talked about just how powerful that brand is.
"Apple is (as we've proven using neuroscience)...a religion," Lindstrom said in the interview. "Not only that--it is a religion based on its communities. Without its core communities, Apple would die--it is already facing strong pressure as the brand simply is becoming too broad (losing) its magic. What's holding it all together is the hundreds if not thousands of communities across the world spreading the passion and creating the myths."
To anyone who has followed Apple over the years, this is not too surprising. But it is interesting that an author like Lindstrom would be willing to codify this in some way.
It would likely be hard for some people, I would think, to be willing to articulate the link between religion and the Apple culture, but as the author points out, there are many similarities, especially when it comes to passion, commitment, and loyalty.
To be sure, there are other brands that have similar followings--but in consumer electronics those names are few and far between. And it often seems as though the Apple fans treat anything that comes out of CEO Steve Jobs' mouth as the true gospel.
I do wonder, of course, as have many others, whether this is a religion that can survive if its leader goes away. In other words, if and when Jobs is no longer at Apple's helm, can anyone step up and be the new prophet? Only time will tell.
This article was posted October 21st 2008 11:19AM.
TV3 New Zealand:
Brain scan study reveals why we buy
Getting you to spend your money is among the biggest industries of our time.
Hundreds of billions of dollars each year on advertising and marketing to get you to buy the shiny brand, the new brand, the brand that will make you hot.
Marketing guru Martin Lindstrom has studied how we are sold to and how we respond. He embarked on a $7 million brain scan study to find how advertising effects our subconscious minds.
It led to a book called Buy-ology: How Everything We Believe About Why We Buy Is Wrong.
This interview was broadcast October 23rd 2008 at 8.00PM
Washington Post:
Buyer, Beware
When the scientists of the future look back at the advances of recent years, they'll be most impressed by what we've learned about the brain. The incarnate soul has been reduced to an intricate network of cells, speaking an obscure electrical code. The question, of course, is what to do with all this new knowledge.
Doctors hope that it will lead to medical breakthroughs; philosophers are revising old theories of objectivity; political scientists are updating their models of voter behavior. And now, in a turn that's both inevitable and disconcerting, the tools of neuroscience have entered the world of advertising. In "Buy-ology," marketing guru Martin Lindstrom argues that the ad campaigns of the future should tweak their messages to manipulate the brain.
This isn't a new idea. In 1958, he writes, television networks banned subliminal advertising after reports surfaced of movie audiences consuming much more Coca-Cola and popcorn when exposed to fleeting images of "Drink Coca-Cola" and "Eat Popcorn." (The images were reportedly flashed for three-thousandths of a second, far too fast for conscious awareness.) Although the whole thing turned out to be a hoax and subsequent research found that subliminal advertising was rarely effective, the point had been made: The public had been forced to consider the possibility that many of our decisions are shaped by forces beyond our control.
Lindstrom wants to reinvent subliminal advertising for the 21st century, finding new ways to bend the unconscious to the corporate will. The fancy name for this approach is neuromarketing, and he argues that the endeavor is entirely benevolent, just another tool to help us "better understand ourselves - our wants, our drives and our motivations."
It's hard to judge Lindstrom's optimism, since neuromarketing is largely a phenomenon of the private sector, which doesn't publish in peer-reviewed journals. Much of "Buy-ology" is based on brain-scanning research funded by "some of the most respected companies in the world," which paid Lindstrom and colleagues millions of dollars to investigate the effects of advertising on the brain.
If "Buy-ology" itself is any indication, these companies got ripped off. It's not that the book doesn't have interesting moments: I enjoyed learning about how slices of lime got indelibly associated with Corona beer and why the logos plastered on race cars are so effective at getting consumers to buy particular brands. However, what makes these stories interesting is that, unlike the rest of the book, they aren't shackled to pseudoscientific explanations meant to encourage larger advertising budgets.
Take mirror neurons, a much-hyped circuit of cells in the pre-motor cortex. These cells have one very interesting property: They fire both when a person moves and when that person sees someone else move. In other words, they collapse the distinction between seeing and doing. That's an exciting idea, but Lindstrom isn't content to stick with the science. Instead, he uses mirror neurons to explain everything from the atmospherics of an Abercrombie & Fitch store (the "large blow-up posters of half-naked models" make your "mirror neurons fire-up") to the smell of coffee in the morning, which causes these cells to "see a cup of Maxwell-House." Lindstrom cheapens the mirror neuron hypothesis by turning it into a justification for almost every successful marketing campaign: Even the triumph of the iPod is merely mirror neurons at work.
He also oversimplifies his explanations of brain-scanning experiments. He describes his own research in breathless prose as "the largest, most revolutionary neuromarketing experiment in history," but his data rarely hold up to closer examination. For instance, he thinks it's incredibly profound that images of well-known brands, such as Harley-Davidson, trigger the "exact same patterns of brain activity" as does religious iconography.
These data, however, clearly say more about the limitations of brain scanners and Lindstrom's experimental protocol than about brands or God. After all, motorcycles typically trigger very different feelings than pictures of nuns and church pews. If these things all look the same in a scanner, then you've missed something important.
When he's not trying to sell his own research, Lindstrom can be a charming writer. He has an encyclopedic knowledge of advertising history and an abundance of real-world business experience. Unfortunately, in "Buy-ology," he gets seduced by the explanatory power of brain science. Perhaps his next experiment should look at why those pictures of the cortex produced by brain-scanning experiments can make people believe such silly things.
Fast Company:
Unlikely Marriage of Science and Consumerism
Why one brand takes off and another tanks remains mostly a mystery, with half of new brands and 75% of individual products failing in their first year. That’s frustrating news to the folks that spend more than $117 billion in marketing in $12 billion in market research annually in the U.S.
In Buyology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy, out this week, global branding expert Martin Lindstrom skips consumer surveys and focus groups and instead takes a peek at consumers’ brains. His multi-million dollar “neuromarketing” study, in which magnetic resonance imaging scanners measure brain activity in different areas of the brain in fine detail, is the largest ever conducted. And Lindstrom dishes up the results, alongside a buffet of past research, with clear writing and deft reasoning.
Here, our favorite studies and their big-brand implications:
Mini Cooper’s Unexpected Associations It’s neither the horsepower nor compact design that most attracts consumers to Daimler-Chrysler’s Mini Cooper. When scientists measured brain activity of people as they looked at images of the Mini, they found an area of the brain that’s stimulated by faces “came alive.” “You just wanted to pinch its little fat metallic cheeks,” writes Lindstrom. And if you’re Daimler-Chrysler, you want to tweak your ads to goose that subconscious link.
Coke’s Emotions vs. Pepsi’s Taste In a blind taste test more people prefer Pepsi to Coke, but when consumers know what they’re drinking, most prefer Coke. What gives? In addition to the ventral putamen, an area associated with appealing tastes, scientists registered brain activity in the prefrontal cortex when subjects knew they were sipping Coke. It’s an area responsible for higher thinking and it was likely pulling up all sorts of positive memories and associations, “the sheer, inarguable, inexorable, ineluctable, emotional Coke-ness of the brand.” So the “two areas of the brain [engage] in a mutual tug-of-war between rational and emotional thinking” and Coke wins by a landslide.
Nokia, Shhh To determine if a signature sound—like Microsoft’s start-up musical notes—makes a brand more attractive than an image alone, doctors took fMRIs as people listened to branded noises and watched logos. Several areas in the brain lit up when both were played together, indicating the combination is more pleasant and longer-lasting than either alone. Yet one brand, Nokia, showed almost the opposite effect. A closer look at the ventrolateral prefrontal cortices (part of the brain’s circuits that process emotional information) showed that the ring triggered potent negative associations (a shrill sound in a silent movie theater, perhaps?)—so strong, in fact, that they overrode the positive response people felt when they saw the silent Nokia logo
Published October 23rd 2008 on FastCompany.com
NBC Weekend TODAY:
Shopping addiction
Watch this ultra short interview with Martin Lindstrom on the Weekend TODAY show where he talks about shopping addiction. The interview was broadcasted live from New York Saturday October 25th 2008.
BusinessWeek:
When an MRI Predicts What You'll Buy
In Lindstrom's Buyology, marketers study brain scans to determine how consumers rate Nokia, Coke, and Ford.
It's a familiar scene if you've ever watched a hospital show. The strapped-down patient is pushed into the narrow tube of a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine and within minutes doctors scan the inner workings of the brain as they search for tumors or lesions. But could the brain scan perhaps also reveal whether the patient likes a new Nokia (NOK) phone or thrills to the vroom of a Harley-Davidson (HOG)? That's the premise of neuromarketing. It's a hot trend and the subject of Buyology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy by Danish consultant Martin Lindstrom.
Lindstrom tells us early on that his neuromarketing research took three years, spanned much of the globe, and cost millions of dollars. (Eight unnamed corporations picked up the tab.) But the research takes up only a fraction of this uneven and sometimes frustrating book. For many more of its pages, we accompany Lindstrom on a broad tour of marketing. He discusses the sexual appeal of Abercrombie & Fitch's (ANF) pitch, the history of subliminal ads, and the origins of the lime slice in a bottle of Mexican beer. Lindstrom entices us with the research, which seems to explain much about human behavior, but delivers it too sparingly. "Before we get to our fMRI test and its startling results," he writes at one point, "let's do a little mind experiment of our own."
Yet another detour. Still, the research in Buyology points to a vital trend: Marketers are feasting on new streams of customer data. They can track our wanderings on the Internet and our purchases at the supermarket, and they can start to predict an individual's behavior. The brain scans—both an advanced version of the electroencephalograph, which employs wired skullcaps, and the more expensive fMRI—provide rich new data streams. But drawing definitive conclusions from them is not easy.
Scientists have mapped out the regions of the brain that dominate lust, anger, attention, our protective instincts, and much more. But when those regions light up with activity, it's not clear what behavior will follow—or how it may vary from one person to the next. Scientists' understanding of such brain activity is like the early cartographers' grasp of geography.
In one of his most interesting chapters, Lindstrom delves into the value of product placement—the branded phones, laptops, and liquors that share the screen for a precious second or two with movie or TV stars. Such positioning is especially important now that viewers have tools to zap traditional 30-second ads. But does product placement work? Lindstrom's researchers place brain-monitoring caps on viewers watching American Idol and then study their responses to the Cokes the judges sip, the Fords the contestants pile into between acts, and Cingular, the cell-phone service that lets the public vote.
As it turns out, the viewers emerge with far stronger memories of Coke than of Cingular (T). Ford scores worst of all. Lindstrom theorizes that Coke fares better because it insinuates itself into the action. The judges interact with it while they deliberate. Cingular, by contrast, is just a tool for the TV viewers, and Ford is a mere advertisement. In the end, the carmaker doesn't just lose: Its message is annihilated. Viewers seem to remember less about the company after seeing the commercials than before. Lindstrom goes so far as to suggest that the Coke placements push Ford out of people's memories: The automaker spent $26 million in yearly sponsorship only to lose mindshare.
Like much of Buyology, this conclusion is open to debate. Perhaps good feelings about Ford reside deep in viewers' subconscious and will surface months later. Who's to say? Even with the latest technology, much of the activity in the brain remains invisible, or indecipherable, to us.
Take my brain. As I read the last two chapters of Buyology on a train, a chatty couple sits next to me. They talk. Try as I might, I can't help but listen. If I were wearing a wired skullcap, the patterns might suggest that the duo has captured my attention. Does it mean I'm a fan of theirs? Not by any stretch. Is another region in my brain signaling anger or frustration? Is it shining bright? It's tough to translate these brain patterns. But neuromarketers, including Lindstrom, are busy working at it.
BusinessWeek is on newsstands October 31st 2008. Baker is a senior writer for BusinessWeek in New York.
New York Observer:
The Brain Cell Sell
‘Neuromarketing’ is the wave of the future, says a fast-talking adman
Danish marketing guru Martin Lindstrom’s Buyology is about why, neurologically speaking, we buy some things and not others, leading some brands to fail while others conquer the known universe. Mr. Lindstrom reminds us throughout that he’s advised international corporations on the selling of everything from feminine hygiene products to sore-throat lozenges, so it’s perhaps to be expected that he expends considerable ink selling his book, too, even as he writes it. His is “the largest, most revolutionary neuromarketing experiment in history,” he boasts—a project he hopes will “sculpt the future of advertising” and “revolutionize the way all of us think and behave as consumers.”
Well, not quite. Mr. Lindstrom has some interesting things to say about what attracts us to iPods over PCs, but he doesn’t sound particularly revolutionary or even scientific. Actually, he sounds like someone giving a Power Point presentation in a 10th-floor conference room, with a spread of stale sandwiches off to one side. He favors a casual, snappy vernacular—peppy—as though he were trying to keep us from nodding off. He uses words like “heck” and starts sentences with “Point is …” At one point he admits that “the notion of a science that can peer into the human mind gives a lot of people the willies.” One can imagine a mesmerized audience of eager M.B.A. students.
The author’s basic premise is that as consumers, we are at a loss to explain our purchasing decisions—unaware, for example, that we bought the new iPod because it was so cool-looking we thought merely owning it would get us laid, thereby increasing our reproductive advantage. Only the brain itself can reveal that our visit to the Apple Store was actually a matter of survival of the fittest (meaning we should all buy more iPods immediately), so Mr. Lindstrom set out to “interview” our gray matter. He submitted 2,081 volunteers to machines like the fMRI and the SST (which measures electrical activity inside the brain). He calls his research “neuromarketing,” because it blends science and marketing.
“Market research” and focus groups are dead, he proclaims. Companies are wasting millions of dollars on ads that either don’t work or are turning customers off. Anyone who wasn’t raised on TiVo is bound to agree.
Mr. Lindstrom boldly asserts that car commercials are ineffective because they’re all basically the same and don’t engage us emotionally. He also lets us know that “for its millions of fervent constituents, Apple wasn’t just a brand, it was a religion.” And product placement in movies only works if the product in question is an integral, seamless part of the story, like the Ray-Ban Wayfarers in Risky Business. On the other hand, cigarette warning labels actually enhance cigarette sales, as they stimulate an area of the brain called the “craving spot.” Of course, smokers don’t realize this, which is why Mr. Lindstrom believes we need to scan their brains to find out why they insist on killing themselves. (And, less pressingly, to find out whether we think the ubiquitous Nokia phone ring is annoying. We do.)
He also proclaims, rather grandly, that “by uncovering the brain’s deepest secrets, I wasn’t interested in helping companies manipulate consumers—far from it.” But though he displays genuine ire at the sinister-yet-genius marketing tactics of cigarette companies (which are by his account the most evolved marketers on the planet), he cops to giving hens in Saudi Arabia a “vitamin” to make their egg yolks a more pleasing color of yellow. In other words, it’s a fine line.
Mr. Lindstrom says his research cost $7 million and consumed seven years of his life. He adds, without further explanation, that it was sponsored by eight multinational corporations. (He identifies them in the acknowledgements; they include Glaxo-Smithkline.)
So much for his consumer advocate’s credentials. This is a business book.
NOT THAT THERE ISN'T some amusing trivia in Buyology for the casual reader. For example: Did you know Steven Spielberg initially approached M&M’s about being in E.T., and only when they refused did he seek out Reese’s Pieces, causing sales of the candy to triple in the week after the movie’s debut? Or that Bang & Olufsen remote controls are “stuffed with a completely useless wad of aluminum” to make them feel heavy and expensive?
We’re also given a peek into the crystal ball. Martin Lindstrom predicts where the new technology will take us: “Although using brain-scanning technology to sway political decisions is in its infancy, I predict that the 2008 presidential showdown will be the last-ever election to be governed by traditional surveys, and that by 2012, neuroscience will begin to dominate all election predictions.” In other words, no more talk of the “Bradley effect.” Pollsters will just interview our brains to find out whom we’ll be voting for!
Observer is on newsstands October 30th 2008. Meredith Bryan is a reporter at The Observer New York.
The Globe & Mail:
Brand surgery
Brand surgery As long as anyone can remember, marketers have been dying to get inside our heads. What if they really could?
They were so certain they had a winner. In the early 1980s, Coca-Cola spent $4 million conducting nearly 200,000 taste tests and interviews in an attempt to gauge consumer reaction to a sweeter formulation of its century-old soft drink. The data was unequivocal: Consumers preferred the new formula 8% more than Pepsi and an astonishing 20% more than the original Coca-Cola recipe. But none of that would matter. People simply didn't want New Coke, and the resulting product quickly became the greatest marketing disaster of all time. Company president Donald Keogh summed it up thusly: "All the time and money and skill poured into consumer research on the new Coca-Cola could not measure or reveal the deep and abiding emotional attachment to the original Coca-Cola felt by so many people."
That emotional attachment we feel toward certain products and brands is something marketers are dying to understand. They're forever trying to get inside our heads, and they've recently turned to neuroscience for help. Researchers dabbling in "neuromarketing" make use of technology like functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to delve into our minds like never before. It works like this: By measuring blood flow at more than 100,000 locations in the brain and watching the output on an fMRI scanner, scientists can get a pretty good idea of how your brain is processing information. Just last year, a team from MIT, Stanford and Carnegie Mellon made a real breakthrough when they were able to correctly predict which combinations of products and prices would get their subjects to buy a product. All they had to do was watch a group of neurons in the forebrain called the nucleus accumbens (the same portion of the brain that gets turned on when we anticipate a financial gain) and wait for them to light up on the scanner.
A few companies had already been experimenting with this technology. In 2002, scientists working for DaimlerChrysler found that fMRIs could give them a better understanding of how men reacted to cars. In one study, subjects were presented with images of car grilles, and a part of their brains called the fusiform face area (the portion of the temporal lobe that allows us to recognize faces) was triggered. It was later hypothesized that one of the reasons BMW's Mini Cooper had been selling so well was that, at least subconsciously, it had an "adorable face." Furthermore, when drivers were shown pictures of high-performance cars, particularly the Ferrari 360 Modena and the BMW Z8, the areas of the brain associated with concepts of wealth and social dominance were excited. No focus group or survey could ever pick up such a pure and unguarded emotional response.
Martin Lindstrom has spent most of the last 20 years travelling the globe, helping steer the course of such brands as Disney, Pepsi, McDonald's and American Express. According to him, the problem with traditional market research (that is, surveys) is that it relies on people being honest and accurate in their answers. Why would people lie? Any number of reasons. They may be attempting to appear more affluent, cultured or educated than they really are. They may be trying to please or impress the researcher by giving what they believe to be a "correct" answer, or, quite possibly, they are simply unable to articulate how they really feel about a product.
"Surveys and focus groups force people to pass everything they think and feel through a rational verbalization filter," says Lindstrom. "Neuromarketing taps into the 85% of our mind that is unconscious. Try asking someone: Why do you love your wife? Give me three bullet-point answers. It's ridiculous. Yet that is exactly what we're doing when we ask people why they love their iPod."
In 2004, Lindstrom directed the largest neuromarketing study ever conducted. The project lasted three years and involved the work of 200 researchers, 10 professors, and over 2,000 subjects in the U.S., England, Germany, Japan and China who volunteered to have their brains scanned. Lindstrom outlines the results of this study in his book, Buyology, released earlier this month. One of the most fascinating chapters details an experiment that underscores just how powerful some brands have become. A group of people who deem themselves devout were shown a series of religious symbols as well as a number of consumer products, ranging from pints of Guinness to Harley-Davidson motorcycles. The products of particularly powerful brands, researchers noted, lit up the same areas of the brain--just as strongly--as the images of crosses, rosary beads, Mother Teresa, the Virgin Mary and the Bible.
The chances that a machine could help a company make a product so good and so satisfying that using it becomes a quasi-religious experience are slim. Still, there are some who feel that having this much insight into the way we think is simply too much power to put in the hands of marketers. CommercialAlert, the consumer protection organization founded by Ralph Nader, calls neuromarketing "Orwellian" and claims that it will lead to ever more marketing-related diseases such as obesity, diabetes and alcoholism. They find it offensive that one of the world's greatest medical inventions is being used to sell goods, rather than help people.
Martin Lindstrom is unwilling to cede the moral high ground. In his book's introduction, he writes, "The more companies know about our subconscious needs and desires, the more useful, meaningful products they will bring to market. ...Imagine more products that earn more money and satisfy customers at the same time. That's a nice combo." Neuromarketing isn't mind control; it's market research, and it remains to be seen whether it can help companies avoid disasters like New Coke in the future. After all, the functional MRI is merely a descriptive technology. It's like the difference between a weather map and a climate model: The map can tell you where it's raining, but not why it rains. And that's not going to change any time soon. The brain is still a far more complicated machine than we understand.
The Globe & Mail went on newsstand October 31st 2008
Sunday Times:
Now the buyer must beware
Martin Lindstrom, the boy wonder of branding, tells that the future of shopping is all in the mind.
Martin Lindstrom, a 38-year-old advertising sage, is unusual in his profession for openly loathing the tobacco industry. Which is a shame because it just adores him. Fourteen times in the past two years the cigarette giants have come knocking on his door to beg for his services.
Why? Because Lindstrom, a pint-sized Dane with a curiously high-pitched voice, has the power to make us smoke. His tool is neuro-marketing — or looking directly into our brains — a practice that has hitherto been viewed as bordering on the unethical. Now, with the credit crunch beginning to bite, it increasingly looks like a necessary corporate survival tactic.
The branding guru and futurologist has just published Buyology: How Everything We Believe About Why We Buy is Wrong — based on his four-year £1m worldwide probe into our grey matter. Rigged up to fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imagers) scanners, his subjects have images of chocolate bars and fag packets flashed before their eyes while Lindstrom and his team observe how various parts of their brains light up in response. What he has proved is that our subconscious does most of the decision-making.
“We should not fool ourselves into thinking that we’re in control — we’re not,” he says. “In fact, the more rational a person believes himself to be, the less likely that he will be in control of his choices.”
Do you, for example, prefer the taste of Pepsi but always buy Coke? Or swear blind that you’ll vote Conservative but opt for Labour on election day? Lindstrom — and his scanner — can tell you why. (More worryingly, he can use the information to push your “buy buttons” for the companies that hire him.)
Having set up his first advertising agency at 12 (it defies belief, but he had both employees and clients), he now travels round the world 300 days of the year and is paid millions to dispense his advice to Disney, Nestlé and Microsoft. But Philip Morris or Imperial Tobacco? He tells them to sod off — “Basically because I don’t like smoking,” he tells me when I catch up with him in Zurich. Just as well: in the wrong hands his expertise could be devastating.
One of Lindstrom’s studies, conducted in Britain, attempted to explain why the number of smokers has gone up since the ban on advertising and the introduction of health warnings on cigarette packets. When he showed his test subjects pictures of cigarettes, their nucleus accumbens — the area of the brain that deals with addiction and reward — predictably started to buzz. Then he showed them anti-smoking messages — and they provoked the same cravings.
Apparently, when faced with the message “Smoking kills”, our subconscious just cuts straight to the craving. “Most anti-smoking messages,” he concludes, “are no better than adverts for cigarettes.”
Equally disturbing, Lindstrom has discovered that addicts get a craving even when shown simple images of Ferraris or cowboys. Indeed, Philip Morris has already begun to use this technique — paying some bar owners, for example, to kit out rooms in the colours of its Marlboro brand, with furniture suggestive of the packet design and televisions running landscapes of cowboy country on a loop.
In another study, the most potent brain zone for consumer motivation was the amygdala, where we register fear, anxiety and dread. It’s particularly useful for political campaigns and, if you hit it right, as the Conservative party did in 1979 with its “Labour isn’t working” slogan, it will wipe out all the nuances of debate and get you elected.
Within five years, Lindstrom estimates, a quarter of the money that UK advertisers spend on research — some £250m annually — will be spent on neuro-marketing. The sinister element is that once a company or political party understands your subconscious better than you do, you can be manipulated.
Lindstrom’s critics call his work “Orwellian”; even he concedes that it’s a thorny area: “The reason why neuro-marketing has not kicked in before is because, from an ethical point of view, companies have not wanted to go there. But I wanted to find out how far we can go.”
How far is that exactly? “We cannot go as far as we fear. We cannot — thank God — brainwash consumers, plant a ‘buy’ button in people’s brains. What we can do is look into our subconscious mind and see what affects us and how strongly.” And then use that to target sales? “Well, yes . . .”
One of the key reasons humans are such mad shoppers is dopamine, a euphoria-inducing hormone released by the brain that induces a feeling of security and self-righteousness when we hand over a credit card. Lindstrom pinpoints it as the reason people were happy to borrow four times their salaries to buy houses or stick £900 handbags on a store card. He even says that stockbrokers were chasing a dopamine high when trading, pushing stocks up and up. Greed was our addiction; looming recession is our self-induced come-down.
That does not mean we’ll give up all our dopamine highs. The luxury-goods market will fall, he predicts, but sales of fast food will go up; we’ll take fewer holidays but spend more on televisions, DVDs (particularly romantic comedies) and nostalgia items such as flowery aprons and board games (like Scrabble) because they remind us of childhood and help us to feel cosy and secure as the world crumbles.
How are the big brands going to sell to us? This is where, frankly, we should be a little afraid. For a start, our relationships with some brands are more intense than we realise. In 2006 nuns of various ages were put under an fMRI scanner and asked for their fondest memories of God. Unsurprisingly, the caudate nucleus (joy, serenity, self-awareness) and insula (which apparently registers a feeling of being linked to the divine) both lit up like Christmas trees.
This pattern was thought to be unique to religion — until last year, when Lindstrom saw his subjects’ brains respond in the same way to brand logos such as Harley-Davidson, Guinness and Apple.
That shopping is the new religion is a creaky old cliché. “Now it seems more like scientific fact,” he says. Armed with a scanner and a test group, a corporation can begin to devise sales pitches that light up your “God buttons” and “buy buttons” simultaneously.
One of the best examples is Coca-Cola. For years it was not understood why tasters said they preferred Pepsi to Coke but then bought Coke. Lindstrom cites an fMRI study showing that Pepsi activates the ventral putamen in the majority of consumers, which gets stimulated when we find tastes appealing. But with Coke there is additional activity in the medial prefrontal cortex — the region dedicated to higher thinking and discernment. One sip and our brains flood with memories of happy childhoods and Christmas.
With a better understanding of its brand’s pull, Coca-Cola can get more creative in how to grab us. Indeed, Lindstrom conducted a test in the United States to prove how effective product placement can be.
Along with Ford and AT&T, the mobile phone company, Coca-Cola is one of three principal sponsors of American Idol, the country’s top-rated TV show. While the firms each pay more than $30m annually to run advertisements around the programme, Coca-Cola has woven itself into the action.
Simon Cowell sits at his judging table sipping Coke, and the firm’s signature red is embedded in the set design. The result? No one remembers Ford after the show — we switch off when we are being “advertised” to — but our yearning for a hit of sugary caffeine is sky high.
To be fair, this kind of advertising has been around since MGM movie stars were paid to smoke specific cigarette brands on screen in the 1930s. But it is set to rise exponentially. In 20 years, Lindstrom suggests, Piccadilly Circus in London could be free from neon billboards: “Instead, the streets will be awash with smells and sounds. A whiff of lemon from a store selling a must-have training shoe, clingy perfume wafting from the doors of a hotel.” We already know that fast-food restaurants pump out artificial scents, but the trend is set to rise.
The fear button is also going to prove key. Previously we were sold organic and environmentally friendly products on the basis of their homespun natural goodness. Now that we’re less inclined to put our hands in our pockets for the feelgood factor, brands will resort to scaring us. “They will tell you to buy an energy-saving light bulb if you want your children to have any quality of life,” says Lindstrom.
Within a few years, he predicts, brain-mapping our political desires will be commonplace, too. Who, I ask, does he neuro-instinctively think will win the US election?
“Hate it or love it, McCain could still win. First, a lot of votingis taking place in the churches. If there is a large cross hanging over you while you vote, you may not register it but it will have an influence on you to vote Republican.
“Second, we have done some studies that show some people, sadly, are non-verbally hard-wired to think that a black face is bad and a white face is good.
"Obama will need his big lead, because there will be a substantial subconscious swing to McCain on election day.”
What does he make of Gordon Brown’s plight?
“He is a little bit more appealing to people in a crisis. He’s like Winston Churchill in a way, though the British people didn’t want Churchill once the war was over.”
If Brown hired him, Lindstrom would hook up the brains of a test group to a scanner, bombard them with images of Churchill and see what lobes lit up: “Then we’d build a message based on whether we want Brown to scare us, be confident or to emotionally engage us. Maybe he doesn’t know himself right now.”
With nine volunteers and two fMRI machines, Lindstrom claims he definitely would know — and he would be able to advise Brown exactly which of our buttons to press.
Sunday Times on newsstands November 2nd 2008.
Business Edge:
Striving to make your message stand out
What - exactly - were you thinking?
You bought that latest gadget, the whoozit, a thingamajig, that whatchamacallit, knowing full well you didn't need it. You have one already, equally useless.
It was fun to plunk down money when you bought it, but now you're wondering: What you were thinking?
In a way, you weren't. Your emotions overrode your thoughts, which means the gadget's seller did his homework.
Buyology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy, by Martin Lindstrom; c.2008, Doubleday; $27.95; 256 pages. Hmm. Can that research help your business? Maybe. Read more in Buyology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy, by Martin Lindstrom, the new book about the newest science.
We are a society of shoppers, Lindstrom points out in the beginning of this fascinating study. It's a rare day that we don't buy something, even if it's coffee or a soda from a vending machine. But when you bought that java or the cola, why did you choose the brand you drank?
Researchers know why. While you're doing business, drinking cola, and shopping till you're dropping, laboratory volunteers are wearing swimcap-like devices and subjecting themselves to brain scans. The scans tell researchers what products and commercials delight volunteers' brains. Data also indicates what turns consumers off.
Emotions, as it turns out, will win a buyer over every time, Lindstrom says, which happens long before any conscious decision is reached. Before you've made a thoughtful and (you think) careful buying decision, your brain has practically paid for the purchase. Lindstrom calls it your "buyology."
So how can this intriguing new science help your business?
Because we're inundated by ads, you want your message to stand out. Lindstrom says product placement needs careful consideration; the wrong use of placement may actually weaken consumer recall. Getting people to think about using your product is key because of "mirror neurons.
If they imagine using the product, their brains are tricked into believing it's a done deal.
Lindstrom discusses the use of subliminal advertising (despite the furore of years past, it happens); why logos often don't work but "gimmicky" ads sometimes do; how memories are made; why smart marketers prefer to advertise to your nose; the reason traditional research often yields wrong results; and how, in the future, political campaigns may be run by neuroscience.
When someone tells you that a book is a "page-turner," you probably think of the latest top-list best-seller. Now you'll think of Buyology.
Author Martin Lindstrom is fun and lighthearted, but his research (expensive, as you can imagine, but funded by various entities) is hard-core. It seemed to me that every page has three or four AHA! moments on it, all of which can only make your ad dollars work better and may help your sales team in the field.
The last book I read that was this intriguing was, I think, Why We Buy, by the brilliant researcher Paco Underhill. I'm sure it's no accident that Underhill wrote the foreword here.
Pick up a copy of this book and get one of those highlighting thingamajiggies before you fix your ad budget for the new year. Buyology is definitely money well spent.
Business Edge is on stand 31st Octobe 2008
Sunday Eagle-Tribune:
The science behind what we buy
What — exactly — were you thinking?
You bought that latest gadget, the whoozit, a thingamajig, that whatchamacallit, knowing full well you didn't need it. You have one already, equally useless.
It was fun to plunk down money when you bought it, but now you're wondering: what you were thinking?
In a way, you weren't. Your emotions overrode your thoughts, which means the gadget's seller did his homework.
Hmm. Can that research help your business?
Maybe. Read more in "Buyology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy" by Martin Lindstrom, the new book about the newest science.
We are a society of shoppers, Lindstrom points out in the beginning of this fascinating study. It's a rare day that we don't buy something, even if it's coffee or a soda from a vending machine. But when you bought that java or the cola, why did you choose the brand you did?
Researchers know why. While you're doing business, drinking cola, and shopping till you're dropping, laboratory volunteers are wearing swim-cap-like devices and subjecting themselves to brain scans. The scans tell researchers what products and commercials delight the volunteers' brains. Data also indicates what turns consumers off.
Emotions, as it turns out, will win a buyer over every time, Lindstrom says, which happens long before any conscious decision is reached. Before you've made a thoughtful and (you think) careful buying decision, your brain has practically paid for the purchase. Lindstrom calls it your "Buyology."
So how can this intriguing new science help your business?
Because we're inundated by ads, you want your message to stand out. Lindstrom says product placement needs careful consideration; the wrong use of placement may actually weaken consumer recall. Getting people to think about using your product is key because of "mirror neurons." If they imagine using the product, their brains are tricked into believing it's a done deal.
Lindstrom discusses the use of subliminal advertising (despite the furor of years past, it happens); why logos often don't work, but "gimmicky" ads sometimes do; how memories are made; why smart marketers prefer to advertise to your nose; the reason traditional research often yields wrong results; and how, in the future, political campaigns may be run by neuroscience.
When someone tells you a book is a "page-turner," you probably think of the latest best-seller. Now you'll think of "Buyology."
Author Martin Lindstrom is fun and lighthearted, but his research (expensive, as you can imagine, but funded by various entities) is hard-core. It seemed to me that every page had three or four "Aha!" moments on it, all of which can only make your advertising dollars work better and help your sales team in the field.
The last book I read that was this intriguing was, I think, "Why We Buy" by the brilliant researcher, Paco Underhill. I'm sure it's no accident that Underhill wrote the foreword here.
Pick up a copy of this book and get one of those highlighting thingamajiggies before you fix your ad budget for the new year. "Buyology" is definitely money well-spent.
Terri Schlichenmeyer reviews books for the Sunday Eagle-Tribune - on newsstands November 2nd 2008.
FORTUNE:
This Is Your Brain on Subliminal Ads
IF ADVERTISERS CONTINUE to pare their spending as the economy slows, they'll have to learn how to do more with less. In Martin Lindstrom's new book Buyology, the marketing guru tries to get to the bottom of what works and what doesn't by using scientific studies to observe buyer behavior 90% of which he says is driven by our unconscious minds.
COCKTAIL PARTY FODDER: In one of Lindstrom's studies, smokers linked to an MRI machine first looked at images associated with different cigarette brands cowboys, camels and then at logos of actual cigarette companies. The subjects' brains responded more strongly to the symbolic images than to the others, suggesting logos aren't necessarily marketers' most powerful tools.
Also: Lindstrom gave Tiffany's boxes to 600 women and found their heart rates went up 20% when they received them. One look at its distinctive robin's-egg blue color, Lindstrom found, triggered thoughts and anxiety about marriage, weddings, and raising a family.
FORTUNE is on news-stands November 24, 2008
New York Daily News:
Shopping tips for the holiday season
Sales aren't the only strategy used by retailers to get shoppers to spend. "They have some tricks up their sleeves which are pretty interesting," says Martin Lindstrom, who researched the various ways retailers manipulate us. Below, he reveals the tricks of the trade and offers his advice on how to resist such schemes this season.
LEAVE THE KIDS AT HOME "The retailer will work on a technique which is very cute: ‘Bring the children with you out shopping,'" warns Lindstrom. "‘We have Santa Claus. We have special play tables for the kids. Enjoy the time while it lasts because you don't spend enough time with your kids.' They're working the guilt factor. When you walk around in the supermarket or the department store and little Peter's with you and he wants to have that video game or candy, you're going to put it in the basket. And that, we know from research, can increase purchases by about 20%."
DON'T FALL FOR DEMOS Beware of in-store cooking lessons, advising sessions or clinics. "The first thing you'll see is they will create a lot of events in stores because that's how they get people to come inside," Lindstrom says. "If they manage to get customers behind their doors, chances of persuading them to buy is so much higher."
BE AWARE OF SEDUCTIVE SCENTS AND SOUNDS "There will be beautiful smells of cookies being baked and those type of holiday treats," says Lindstrom. "We know from the ‘Buyology' study that if you pump in smells in the retail stores, it makes people buy up to 29% more. Sound is going to be very prominent — believe it or not. We observed an amazing experiment conducted a couple of months ago with French, Italian and American wines. They started to play French music — very subtle — and the sales of French wine skyrocketed, up to 45%."
CHOOSE A SMALL SHOPPING CART "Shopping baskets are going to increase in size," Lindstrom says. "Our studies show that the bigger basket you have, the more you spend. We also noted that if a basket is double the size, you are actually increasing your purchase by up to 30%."
WRITE A SHOPPING LIST "Nail down everything you're planning to buy that you need," Lindstrom advises. "Make it very detailed. Also, put brand names on it — and not the expensive brand names. When you make a list, you're saving up to 40%-50%, because that means you're not being inspired, and inspiration is what retail is all about. That's the way we catch people."
NEVER SHOP HUNGRY "Retailers are going to put up specials from 10 to 12 in the morning and from 5-7 in the evening," Lindstrom says. "Because you're hungry during that period. And we do know that if you're very hungry, you'll actually buy more — not just food, but everything. This is a way for us to fulfill the hungry feeling in our stomach. We know if you're hungry, you're likely to buy 18% more. Eat before you go out."
New York Times on stands November 9th 2008
Marketplace:
The ways stores entice shoppers to buy
Marketing expert Martin Lindstrom says stores have special ways to get shopppers to spend. Kai Ryssdal gets him to reveal some of their methods.
Kai Ryssdal: When the economy slows, consumers predictably start changing their behavior -- trying to be more thrifty and less impulsive. Just as predictably, stores change their tactics to try to get around those good intentions. Often, they do it in ways we're not aware of, not even at a physiological level. It's a technique called neuromarketing.
In his new book, "Buyology" -- that's B-U-Y-ology -- marketing expert Martin Lindstrom explores what makes shoppers tick deep down. We met up at a new mall here in Los Angeles to find out how retailers hit and sometimes miss the mark.
Martin Lindstrom: We're just pausing by the Barnes & Noble store right now, and as you can see they have a nice island in there . . .
Ryssdal: Yup.
Lindstrom: . . . in the middle of the store promoting books. Now, does that work or not, do you think?
Ryssdal: I don't know. I mean, I love books, so it works for me. Maybe not everybody, though.
Lindstrom: We did an experiment with chocolate. We offered women a box of chocolate with 30 pieces in it. We said to them, "Take as much as you want." Guess what? They took one piece. Then we gave them a box of chocolate with only six pieces in it. We said, "Take as much as you want." They took three pieces. What we have learned is less is better than more.
Ryssdal: When you did this study and this research, did you actually put people in MRI machines and do the brain scans?
Lindstrom: We did. And we did it with a lot of peole. We had over 2,000 consumers' brains we were scanning across from five countires. And we needed to use that when it came to smoking to subliminal advertising and to the influences of our senses, because we know those factors are ingrained into our brain and we cannot verbalize it, so we had to use brain slides to find out the answers .
Ryssdal: This is about so much more than branding and consumer experience, isn't it?
Lindstrom: It is. This is about our life, because . . . I just noticed when we met up, Kai, that you were holding a Starbucks coffee cup in your hand.
Ryssdal: Guilty.
Lindstrom: Why do you do that?
Ryssdal: Because I needed a cup of coffee. It's been a long day.
Lindstrom: Yeah, and it's a ritual.
Ryssdal: And you know what's funny is I walked by two or three other coffee places on the way to Starbucks.
Lindstrom: But you bypass the . . .
Ryssdal: But I bought the Starbucks, yeah.
Lindstrom: So what's interesting is that, first of all, it's a ritual. You walk to work, right, and you have to have it there. And I'll bet you, if one day you do not have that in your hand, guess what? You're whole morning is destroyed, right.
Ryssdal: That is true.
Lindstrom: Secondly, what's interesting is the tactile sensation you have on that cup. You know this little cardboard they have around.
Ryssdal: Right. Yeah.
Lindstrom: In fact, we remove that for fun sometimes. And people did not feel the coffee tasting as well any more, becauses the tactile sensation is programming our brain to think it tastes better.
Ryssdal: So, let's do the consumer advocate thing, here, and tell me how we as consumers can be smart to all this, other than buying and reading your book.
Lindstrom: [laughs] Well, you know, I think No. 1 point is: skip the shopping trolley. You know I was in Woolworth the other day and I'd been into Whole Foods the other day, and those brands are actually increasing the size of the shopping baskets right now. In fact, Whole Foods basket is now double the size as it was last year. You know why? Because if it's double the size, you buy 30 percent more products. And you do that because you look down into this huge basket in Wal-Mart, for example, and there's five products down there and . . . "Oh, I haven't bought anything," right.
Ryssdal: Right.
Lindstrom: Well, guess what? You [actually end up] buying much more.
Ryssdal: Are all of these things, the signage and the false scarcity and the branding and all this neuroscience, are they enough to help retailers in the economy that this country and a lot of the rest of the world is in right now?
Lindstrom: No, it's not. They will struggle no matter what. And we will see that this Christmas is probably going to be the worst in 24 years. And I thinkg the main reason why is because the first time ever we are realizing this is serious stuff. This time it's almost like we got a slap on the chin. And when that slap on the chin, and we know that from neuroscience, people wake up and they start to say, "Hey, I have to buy stuff differently." And what happens is people literally change stores, people literally change the path down the supermarket aisle. And they have never done that before, but that is the change we are facing right now, and retailers are realizing that.
Ryssdal: Martin Lindstrom, his book is called "Buyology: The Truth and Lies About Why We Buy." Martin, thanks a lot.
The Globe and Mail:
Marketers have always been dying to get inside our heads...
They were so certain they had a winner. In the early 1980s, Coca-Cola spent $4 million conducting nearly 200,000 taste tests and interviews in an attempt to gauge consumer reaction to a sweeter formulation of its century-old soft drink. The data was unequivocal: Consumers preferred the new formula 8% more than Pepsi and an astonishing 20% more than the original Coca-Cola recipe. But none of that would matter. People simply didn't want New Coke, and the resulting product quickly became the greatest marketing disaster of all time. Company president Donald Keogh summed it up thusly: "All the time and money and skill poured into consumer research on the new Coca-Cola could not measure or reveal the deep and abiding emotional attachment to the original Coca-Cola felt by so many people."
That emotional attachment we feel toward certain products and brands is something marketers are dying to understand. They're forever trying to get inside our heads, and they've recently turned to neuroscience for help. Researchers dabbling in "neuromarketing" make use of technology like functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to delve into our minds like never before. It works like this: By measuring blood flow at more than 100,000 locations in the brain and watching the output on an fMRI scanner, scientists can get a pretty good idea of how your brain is processing information. Just last year, a team from MIT, Stanford and Carnegie Mellon made a real breakthrough when they were able to correctly predict which combinations of products and prices would get their subjects to buy a product. All they had to do was watch a group of neurons in the forebrain called the nucleus accumbens (the same portion of the brain that gets turned on when we anticipate a financial gain) and wait for them to light up on the scanner.
A few companies had already been experimenting with this technology. In 2002, scientists working for DaimlerChrysler found that fMRIs could give them a better understanding of how men reacted to cars. In one study, subjects were presented with images of car grilles, and a part of their brains called the fusiform face area (the portion of the temporal lobe that allows us to recognize faces) was triggered. It was later hypothesized that one of the reasons BMW's Mini Cooper had been selling so well was that, at least subconsciously, it had an "adorable face." Furthermore, when drivers were shown pictures of high-performance cars, particularly the Ferrari 360 Modena and the BMW Z8, the areas of the brain associated with concepts of wealth and social dominance were excited. No focus group or survey could ever pick up such a pure and unguarded emotional response.
Martin Lindstrom has spent most of the last 20 years travelling the globe, helping steer the course of such brands as Disney, Pepsi, McDonald's and American Express. According to him, the problem with traditional market research (that is, surveys) is that it relies on people being honest and accurate in their answers. Why would people lie? Any number of reasons. They may be attempting to appear more affluent, cultured or educated than they really are. They may be trying to please or impress the researcher by giving what they believe to be a "correct" answer, or, quite possibly, they are simply unable to articulate how they really feel about a product.
"Surveys and focus groups force people to pass everything they think and feel through a rational verbalization filter," says Lindstrom. "Neuromarketing taps into the 85% of our mind that is unconscious. Try asking someone: Why do you love your wife? Give me three bullet-point answers. It's ridiculous. Yet that is exactly what we're doing when we ask people why they love their iPod."
In 2004, Lindstrom directed the largest neuromarketing study ever conducted. The project lasted three years and involved the work of 200 researchers, 10 professors, and over 2,000 subjects in the U.S., England, Germany, Japan and China who volunteered to have their brains scanned. Lindstrom outlines the results of this study in his book, Buyology, released earlier this month. One of the most fascinating chapters details an experiment that underscores just how powerful some brands have become. A group of people who deem themselves devout were shown a series of religious symbols as well as a number of consumer products, ranging from pints of Guinness to Harley-Davidson motorcycles. The products of particularly powerful brands, researchers noted, lit up the same areas of the brain-just as strongly-as the images of crosses, rosary beads, Mother Teresa, the Virgin Mary and the Bible.
The chances that a machine could help a company make a product so good and so satisfying that using it becomes a quasi-religious experience are slim. Still, there are some who feel that having this much insight into the way we think is simply too much power to put in the hands of marketers. CommercialAlert, the consumer protection organization founded by Ralph Nader, calls neuromarketing "Orwellian" and claims that it will lead to ever more marketing-related diseases such as obesity, diabetes and alcoholism. They find it offensive that one of the world's greatest medical inventions is being used to sell goods, rather than help people.
Martin Lindstrom is unwilling to cede the moral high ground. In his book's introduction, he writes, "The more companies know about our subconscious needs and desires, the more useful, meaningful products they will bring to market. ...Imagine more products that earn more money and satisfy customers at the same time. That's a nice combo." Neuromarketing isn't mind control; it's market research, and it remains to be seen whether it can help companies avoid disasters like New Coke in the future. After all, the functional MRI is merely a descriptive technology. It's like the difference between a weather map and a climate model: The map can tell you where it's raining, but not why it rains. And that's not going to change any time soon. The brain is still a far more complicated machine than we understand.
Globe and Mail on stands October 31, 2008
Fort Worth Star-Telegram:
Loose Change: Read this
Sex in advertising is overrated as a catalyst for selling products. Sometimes it boosts sales, but often it actually diverts attention from the product. That is one of the plethora of counterintuitive findings served up by marketing guru Martin Lindstrom in this thought-provoking examination of the thought processes that propel consumer behavior. Among the other marketing issues examined by Lindstrom are the continuing use of subliminal advertising, despite governmental bans against it, and how some companies adopt techniques derived from religion to promote ritualistic consumer behavior. Much conventional wisdom is debunked in these pages.
Fort Worth Star-Telegram on stands November 3, 2008
Associated Press:
Does sex really sell?
Oftentimes, sex doesn't sell anything other than itself, according to Martin Lindstrom's recently released book "Buyology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy." His research found that a racy ad can often distract someone from a product altogether.
Lindstrom used MRI exams on more than 2,000 people to observe how they reacted to certain ads, and found that advertising myths like the one that "sex sells" can have unintended consequences for a company. More often than not, it's the consumer who's being fooled, he said.
Negative campaigns like anti-smoking billboards and commercials can help sell the very product they're warning against, Lindstrom said, driving people to crave tobacco because of a link formed in the brain between the message and the pleasure of smoking.
"These warnings are having the complete opposite effect of what people expect," Lindstrom said, noting that tobacco companies often fund anti-smoking campaigns. "When we see these warnings we let our critical guard down, making us even more vulnerable to this strategic advertising. It's manipulative, really."
Wondering whether you've been persuaded to buy something recently? It could be in a simple ritual. The next time you slide a slice of lime down the neck of your bottle of Corona, or patiently wait for the foamy head of your Guinness to settle, consider why you think it makes your beer more enjoyable. According to Lindstrom, both practices originated as marketing strategies.
"There are subliminal messages and pressures in everything we see and smell," Lindstrom said. "We're affected by advertising in everything we do."
Associated Press from November 11, 2008
WWD Lifestyle:
In Search of the Buy Sign
When he was walking around Tokyo’s Shibuya district this year, marketing consultant Martin Lindstrom got a text message from Starbucks on his cell phone saying, “Martin, one of your friends is in the area. Would you like to meet him?”
After failing to spot anyone familiar, Lindstrom responded that he would like to meet the friend. Starbucks answered, telling him, “Starbucks would like to sponsor your meeting. He is at the nearest Starbucks, one-and-a-half minutes away and we’ll give you a free cup of coffee.” When Lindstrom arrived at the coffee shop, his friend was indeed waiting. “I didn’t know he was in town,” he recalled. Both had signed up for track-a-friend connections.
It’s this kind of product placement — contextual product placement “where the brand helps me to become a hero” — that is likely to emerge as the “number-one marketing tool” inside 10 years, predicted Lindstrom, author of newly published “Buyology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy” (Doubleday, $24.95).
If things unfold the way the 38-year-old, globe-trotting native of Copenhagen anticipates, the marketing landscape worldwide will have changed significantly. Lindstrom pans product placement as the least effective form of marketing, working about 1 percent of the time. “We are hardwired to be seduced by stories,” he said, noting our brains “filter” out brand images that are randomly or commercially dropped into a story where they play no role. “What does the brain say about that? It says, ‘Forget about that. It’s destroying my story line and I can’t cope.’”
Most of this could be happening without our even knowing about it. Based on his research for “Buyology” — functional MRI- and EEG-like brain scans of what stimulates craving, status seeking and other responses in 2,000 people — Lindstrom contends that 85 percent of what we do is prompted by subconscious triggers. While we may think we’ve bought a shirt or gone to a concert for one reason or another, the author suggests otherwise. “It’s not that we mean to lie — it’s just that our unconscious minds are a lot better interpreting our behavior [including why we buy],” he writes.
Though marketing to evoke particular brain responses may elicit images of the thought police, the way Lindstrom sees it, his findings mean that roughly 85 percent of marketing money is being wasted. Last year, that amounted to about $99 billion of the $117 billion he estimates was spent on marketing products in the U.S., including advertising, packaging and displays. He would also throw in another $10 billion wasted on the market research.
What is working is advertising of the subliminal variety. “Subliminal advertising, hate it or love it, is much more powerful than anything else I’ve seen,” Lindstrom said. “It is probably the reason we have 17 million shopaholics in [the U.S.]. People have built whole lives around the entertainment of shopping, rather than entertaining themselves.”
With mirror neurons that incline us to mimic the actions of others, and the feel-good dopamine rush that accompanies buying something, consumers may be easy marks for marketers that can play to those impulses.
Take Abercrombie & Fitch, for example. “As the clerk rings up and bags your purchases in that beautiful black-and-white Abercrombie bag tattooed with bare-chested models, you’re feeling cool, you’re feeling gorgeous — you’re feeling like one of ‘them,’” Lindstrom wrote in his book. “[This] produces a feeling the brain automatically links back to the models [hired to hang out] outside, the fragrant and pervasive smell, and the late-night atmosphere of the store itself….You’re taking home a little bit of that popularity with you.”
Or, at the least, one’s nucleus accumbens — the “craving spot” around the head’s temple — may have been triggered. The author-consultant himself believes he has experienced this. While tooling around in the Second Life Web site one evening, he saw a Pizza Hut storefront with a sun rising behind it appear in the virtual community on his computer screen. The dawn of a new day? No, simply a pizza promptly ordered by Lindstrom and delivered to his home, about a half hour later.
WWD Lifestyle on stands November 12, 2008
New York Times:
Inside the List
CONSUMER CULTURE: Never mind the retail slowdown: the marketing guru Martin Lindstrom’s “Buyology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy” enters the hardcover nonfiction list at No. 11, on the strength of wisdom like “Sex doesn’t sell” and “The robin’s egg blue of a certain famous jewelry brand significantly raises women’s heart rates.”
Tell that last one to Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, who make their debut at No. 16 on the hardcover nonfiction list with “Influence,” a snapshot-heavy tribute to 23 of the “creative, dynamic and wonderfully bizarre” people in their lives, including themselves.
I’ve always had trouble telling the twins apart, but the jacket copy helpfully points out that Mary-Kate is an “actress, designer and entrepreneur,” while Ashley is a “designer, entrepreneur, actress and style icon.” Got it.
New York Times on November 14, 2008
New York Daily News:
Attention, shoppers: Get set for Dec. 15
Right now, Martin Lindstrom (author of the new book "Buyology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy") says, most retailers are playing the "fear factor" game, trying to convince customers that whatever discount they are offering won't be available for long.
"They're saying, 'We have a special offer here, but this is only a limited offer for the next two hours or else you'll totally miss this opportunity," notes Lindstrom, a marketing guru who's advised executives at companies like McDonald's, Microsoft and Disney.
His advice: Unless you're in the market for recession-proof items (such as toys and food), hang on to your money for another month or so.
"This is going to be one of the most shocking holiday seasons in decades," he says, predicting that the Dec. 15 price-drop will be driven by retailers so desperate to meet their numbers that customers who are in the loop will be able to cash in big-time.
"I estimate that the offers coming from retail this year will be 20%-30% better than they were last year," he says. "We are going to see some of the most amazing offers ever seen."
High-priced products, he says, will have the most drastic drops. The categories that will witness gigantic discounts include audio equipment, flat-panel TVs and Blu-ray DVD players, he believes: "I would not be surprised if we witness discounts of up to 50% within these categories. Home decoration and other higher-priced items will see a price drop almost similar to those."
What's more, he cautions, don't plan your holiday vacation just yet.
"We are also likely to see some fabulous price drops within the travel industry — amazing accommodation packages and last-minute offerings," he says. "And you'll be swamped in spa offers and other luxury packages which simply won't sell. Do not book your ticket now — take the chance and wait and see. I'm almost 100% sure that you'll grab a fantastic deal after Dec. 15."
There are items, however, worth snatching up now. "The only categories where we won't see major drops in prices will be the toy categories and certain food items," Lindstrom says. "So if there is a special toy you want to buy your kids — and the price already is at a low level — buy it now, as this may very well be ripped away by other parents in similar situations."
So play your cards right, and you'll come out on top.
"In reality, you're the one with the best card in your hand because you're the one with the money," Lindstrom says. "Consumers should remember that."
New York Daily News on stands November 17th 2008
Fortune:
This Is Your Brain on Subliminal Ads
IF ADVERTISERS CONTINUE to pare their spending as the economy slows, they'll have to learn how to do more with less. In Martin Lindstrom's new book Buyology, the marketing guru tries to get to the bottom of what works and what doesn't by using scientific studies to observe buyer behavior 90% of which he says is driven by our unconscious minds.
COCKTAIL PARTY FODDER: In one of Lindstrom's studies, smokers linked to an MRI machine first looked at images associated with different cigarette brands cowboys, camels and then at logos of actual cigarette companies. The subjects' brains responded more strongly to the symbolic images than to the others, suggesting logos aren't necessarily marketers' most powerful tools. Also: Lindstrom gave Tiffany's boxes to 600 women and found their heart rates went up 20% when they received them. One look at its distinctive robin's-egg blue color, Lindstrom found, triggered thoughts and anxiety about marriage, weddings, and raising a family.
FORTUNE on stands November 24, 2008
Los Angeles Times:
American Idol Daily: King Cook
The first day of "Idol" champion David Cook's post-show career began with a very positive sign: His album debuted in the top position on the iTunes top albums chart — sweeping aside not just his Season 7 opponent David Archuleta but also the formidable marketplace powers of Taylor Swift, the "Twilight" soundtrack, Beyonce, Britney and Nickelback. Idol Nation anxiously awaits the arrival of hard numbers on both Davids' sales with upcoming charts, but in the meantime this bodes well for a singer who less than a year ago, in the opening days of the top 24, was given less a chance of winning than the guy who worked the backstage coat room. He was the singer whom judge Cowell dismissed out of hand, saying he had zero charisma.
But coming out of nowhere during Season 7, Cook owned the Idoldome as no one has since Season 4's Carrie Underwood. Often called the smartest of contestants, Cook showed the rare ability to learn as he went along, to shape himself for the competition and to consistently turn in the show-stopping, history-making performances that bond "Idol" audiences with their performers forever, building a fan base that stretched from a hard-core cougar following to a tween movement that at times rivaled that of the Chosen One himself, David Archuleta. And now, he belongs to the world.
Best of luck to the boy from Tulsa. The rest of the day's "Idol" news is after the jump.
While David Cook uncorks the bubbly, there must be some long faces tonight around the executive suites of the Ford Motor Co. — and not just because of the looming shadow of bankruptcy hanging over the car maker. No, far more consequential to Idol Nation are the results of a study by Martin Lindstrom just published in AdAge. A practitioner of neuro-marketing, the scientific study of how brain waves that react to advertising, Lindstrom used "Idol" as the platform on which to stage a test of his theory that in the modern media world, where consumers are bombarded with marketing messages, the brain finds ways to shut out many television sponsorships to defend itself from being overwhelmed and having no room left for individual thought.
In the study, 2,000 people were shown a sequence of "Idol" clips, and then brain scans were used to see how well each recalled the involvement of "Idol's" three major sponsors: Coke, Cingular (now AT&T) and Ford. "Idol" was selected because of the high level of integration of the products into the fabric of the show. For Coke and Cingular, Lindstrom found, the level of recall was fairly high, with red-Coke branded elements of the show nestling deep in the minds of the test subjects. For Ford, however, the news was not quite so good:
Unlike Coca-Cola and Cingular, the brand decreased its equity. In fact, the brand equity Ford had before the study fell consistently throughout the show and ended up negative after the show. In layman's terms, the brand was deleted from the brain. We were all stunned to discover that. Was it really true that a brand could erase itself if placed in the wrong context?
Whereas Coca-Cola and Cingular had created reasons for their existence, Ford had struggled to find a solid and justifiable role. What we learned was that if a brand is part of a story line, our brains will accept the role of the brand and remember its presence. However, if a brand and its role don't support the story line, the opposite will happen: Our brains will simply erase it. That's the way we survive and keep from ending up like zombies, considering the average of 2,000 brand messages we are exposed to every day.
I can't be the only who gets chills remembering the glories of the "Tainted Love" video, can I?
-- Some good news to lighten the recent tragic days of Jennifer Hudson. Her debut album was certified gold after just five weeks on the charts.
-- "Idol" Overlord Simon Fuller and departed Ringmaster Nigel Lythgoe have announced their latest prime-time effort. Taking their "So You Think You Can Dance" partnership to the next level, the pair announced:
NBC will broadcast "Superstar Dancers of the World" (working title), a breathtaking international dance competition led by executive producers Nigel Lythgoe and Simon Fuller, two of the masterminds behind "American Idol" and "So You Think You Can Dance" and hosted by Michael Flatley ("Lord of the Dance"). For broadcast in early 2009, the unique series will pit the masters of various dance genres from eight countries against each other. Equal parts sporting event, rock concert and artistic exhibition, "Superstar Dancers of the World" is poised to become one the greatest spectacles of dance performance ever seen on television.
The citizens of the Idoldome miss Nigel already but are looking forward to his latest spectacular.
-- The Philippines seem the place to be right now for the children of the Season 7 diaspora. The Duende from Down Under, Michael Johns, filed an entry to his MySpace blog after playing a show in the land of Mulabay. Apparently, the legend of "American Idol" burns strong in the Philippines. Johns reports his delighted surprise to find himself greeted by his image staring down from billboards and at having large, enthusiastic crowds at his show.
He also reports on his latest activities, and he seems to be wasting no time moving forward with his post-"Idol" career. He writes:
I want to say thank you for all the early buzz you have shown me about Another Christmas. It is a song i never intended releasing. It was written for my family a couple of years ago as a presant. However when i showed it to a few people recently they flipped out and said people have to hear this. I then went to my friend Nancy O'Dell and told her i wanted to donate all proceeds to charity. I asked her if i could make her main charity's ALS and the Red Cross the recipients. It will be available Dec 9th on Itunes everywhere. My David Foster and Friends is out on DVD as Nov 11th. It is such a great concert and a great Christmas presant too haha. The Documentary i help score Dont Look Down about Shaun White is out on ESPN Jan 2nd with the DVD coming out a week later.
There has been no official announcement of the album, but rumor has it that it will be a Johns-guided project along the lines of how Elliott Yamin brought his own work to market (and made a fortune when it took off).
-- Season 3 champion Ruben Studdard (backed by Frenchie Davis and Trenyce Cobbins) is making his stage debut in Atlanta, starring in a 30th anniversary revival of the Fats Waller tribute musical "Ain't Misbehaving." Studdard told the Atlanta Journal Constitution about recording the production's cast album: “I haven’t had to work that hard since I was in college... It was a challenge.”
SF Gate:
Black Friday: Shoppers will be smarter this year
Even though recent economic reports have shown sharp downturns in Americans' spending, some consumer experts believe that deep discounts and other buying incentives will whittle away at the willpower of those hoping to curb their holiday shopping habit.
"This is going to be the year of shopping," said Martin Lindstrom, author of "Buy-ology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy" (Doubleday, 2008). Big markdowns spur a primal instinct in shoppers, he said, causing them to want to buy things they may not need or can't really afford because they think such low prices might not come around again for a long time.
This may explain, in part, why bargain hunters turned out in droves last weekend after the Gap, Old Navy and Banana Republic stores sent out 30 percent off coupons via e-mail. At the Bay Street Banana Republic in Emeryville, there were 20-minute waits to get into a dressing room and 40-minute waits to get through the checkout line. Shoppers had armloads of clothes stacked so high that store personnel began offering to tote them to temporary holding spots as people waited. Other well-known chains, such as Ann Taylor, Talbots, Nine West and H&M, have made similar offers, as have department stores like Macy's and Bloomingdale's.
Even luxury jeweler Bulgari sent out an e-mail announcing an up to 75 percent off sale to be held in New York. . Online retailers are also upping the ante. The site eDressMe, for example, sent out an e-mail Friday advertising 85 percent off designer dresses by designers like Tracy Reese and Anna Sui.
If these incentives don't lure people to the registers, Lindstrom said, he expects to see even more dramatic deals come mid-December, when retailer panic sets in.
According to a recent Maritz Poll, 41 percent of 1,525 randomly selected respondents in the United States said they plan to shop on Black Friday, slightly higher than the 37 percent who said the same when polled last year. And retailers are finding ever more creative ways to try to get people into the buying spirit.
Shoppers can sign up at the J.C. Penney Web site for "Ready, Set, WAKE UP and Shop," jcp.com/mobile, to receive an "energizing wake up call to their mobile phone" so they won't miss out on the sale starting at 4 a.m. Santana Row sent out an e-mail full of coupons for Black Friday shoppers, offering free cookies at Subway and coffee from Starbucks starting at 3 a.m. The Premium Outlet malls in Gilroy, Petaluma, Napa, Folsom and Vacaville are opening at the stroke of midnight.
"There will be almost as many people out there buying stuff, but they won't be buying as much," Lindstrom predicted. "People will buy 24 to 25 percent less. What people will buy is different as well. It'll be much more practical. They won't be so much into buying heavy (prestige) brands."
But there are those who aren't convinced that there's much retailers can do to turn the tide of frugality and pessimism.
"A third of the people have slammed their wallets shut. Another third is spending carefully," said Paco Underhill, author of "Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping," (Simon and Schuster, 1999).
Other shoppers are vowing to stay away altogether, albeit not just for financial reasons.
"I don't want to go to the mall from Thanksgiving to after New Year's," said Rena Ramirez, 25. "(People) will be stressed out and still feel obligated to do the holiday thing. I think (the mall) will be the epicenter for the worst moods ever. And chaos. I just don't want to be anywhere near it."
Ramirez , who lives in San Francisco, said she plans to buy everyone on her list the Shamwow, a towel, chamois and sponge product that is heavily advertised on television. "I'm a sucker for products that are going to do 10 useful things. You get eight for $19.95. I'm much more into getting things that people are actually going to use."
Online sales are expected to grow this year as well, and are expected to reach $32 billion in 2008, according to Internet market research firm eMarketer. That would be a 10 percent increase from 2007.
Underhill said holiday shopping is not just a dollar-and-cents issue, it's also one of common sense.
"I think one of the most important things about being a good holiday shopper is thinking first, because it isn't the amount of money you spend but the thought you put into it," he said. "I'm trying to look at this as the silver lining of this dark cloud is we learn to be better consumers." Be a savvy shopper
Martin Lindstrom's tips for responsible holiday shopping:
-- Avoid shopping with children, as research shows shoppers doing so spend 40 percent more than planned.
-- Eat first. If you're hungry, you'll buy more of everything - from food to flat-screen televisions.
-- Carefully consider the actual price you are paying, not how the cost is promoted. Lindstrom once conducted an experiment at a grocery store where he posted a $1.95 price tag near cans of soup. "The next day we put a little tag next to it that said "Maximum eight cans per customer," and people bought like crazy," he said.
-- Pay for your purchases in cash. Research shows that shoppers spend as much as 30 percent more when using credit cards.
-- Consider not using a shopping cart - they've doubled in size over the past two years, and shoppers buy considerably more because of it.
SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE on Friday, November 21, 2008
Forbes:
Beyond The Logo
"Make it bigger," the executive suggested as I scrambled to sign off on an ad on behalf of a major fashion brand. I wasn't the slightest bit surprised. For as long as I can remember, the size and placement of a product's logo has been the holiest grail of branding.
But considering that by retirement age the average American has watched roughly 2 million TV commercials (and no doubt been exposed to an equivalent number of billboard ads), has the logo overstayed its welcome? In a multimillion-dollar global neuro-marketing study dubbed Project Buyology, I decided to peer inside consumers' brains to find out.
Over the years I've been perplexed by the fact that despite worldwide tobacco-advertising bans and astronomical government investment in anti-smoking initiatives, global consumers continue to inhale 5,765 billion cigarettes a year--and that's not even including the huge duty-free or international black market trades.
The World Bank projects that the number of tobacco users is only going to shoot up further--from a current level of 1.4 billion smokers to roughly 1.6 billion by 2025. Four-year-old kids know about the health dangers of smoking; so why, pray tell, do brands like Marlboro and Camel still rank as among the most powerful in the world?
If experts generally agree that 85% of everything we do takes place in our subconscious minds, it seemed only fitting to target the human brain. Project Buyology, the largest project of its kind, enlisted roughly 2,000 volunteers worldwide, who agreed to submit themselves to functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), a type of brain scan, while viewing various cigarette-marketing related imagery.
Over the years, I've turned down numerous entreaties from tobacco companies to work for their cause (if you want to call killing people a cause). For ethical reasons, I've always said no. But that hasn't kept me from distantly--and, admittedly, perversely--admiring these companies' tricks and strategies.
My question was this: Can the desire to smoke be triggered by images merely associated with a brand: images of a camel, a windswept desert, a rugged-looking cowboy or Marlboro's well-known sponsorship of the European Formula One racing circuit, which has forged an inextricable link between smoking and the company's bright red Ferraris? Do smokers even need to process the logos "Marlboro" or "Camel" for the craving spots in their brains to become activated?
Over a two-month period, Project Buyology exposed both social and long-time smokers, as well as non-smokers, to a raft of suggestive images as the fMRI painstakingly scanned their brains.
First, both groups were shown subliminal images that had no overt connection to cigarette brands--those he-man cowboys, sunsets, camels and deserts. Next, they were shown explicit cigarette advertising images including the Marlboro Man and Joe Camel hunched over his motorcycle, as well as the Marlboro and Camel logos. Our goal was to determine if the subliminal images would generate similar cravings to those generated both by the logos and by the clearly marked Marlboro and Camel packs.
Not surprisingly, as they viewed the actual cigarette packs, the MRI scans revealed a pronounced response in our smokers' nucleus accumbens, a small region in the brain associated with reward, craving and addiction. Far more intriguing was that when the smokers were briefly exposed to the subliminal imagery, their nucleus accumbens lit up even more pronouncedly in the same regions they had when they viewed the explicit images of the packs and logos.
In other words, the iconic imagery merely associated with Camels and Marlboros, such as the Ferrari and the Western sunset, brought on a higher craving activation than either the logos or the actual pictures on the cigarette packs themselves.
But wait a second--why? Well, whether it's due to brand boredom, increased media sophistication or consumers' by-now cast-iron defense mechanisms, when we're exposed to logos, our guards go up. We know we're being manipulated, and we'll do anything in our power to prevent that logo from winning.
So in practical terms, what does our research experiment portend? Think about this: Nearly a century ago, when the first-ever Coca-Cola bottle was in the planning stages, the designer received his marching orders. Company executives wanted him to develop a bottle so distinctive that if you smashed it against a wall, you'd still be able to recognize the pieces as part of a Coke bottle. The designer did what he was told, and to this day it works.
For obvious reasons, I call this philosophy "Smash Your Brand." Even back in 1915, Coke's aim was to replace its logo with a "smashable" component. Today, "smashable" could mean anything from a color, a shape, a sound, a fragrance, a design or any other indirect signal that tells a subtle, suggestive and logo-free story.
See that new iPod Touch over there? Where, on its front, is the word "Apple" spelled out? Nowhere. Did you happen to catch Disney's Pixar's latest flick, Wall-E? Did the white, gleaming female robot heroine put you in mind of anything in particular (such as any one of several Apple products)? That familiar sloping roof, that robin's-egg-blue box--are you thinking, as I am, of McDonald's and Tiffany?
Instead of flashing another logo, or bringing out yet another forgettable movie product placement--all of which will only induce consumers to respond defensively and critically--in the future the simple power of suggestion will entice customers to accompany advertisers on a journey, at the same time engaging their subconscious minds.
No, the logo isn't dead yet, but it's on life support. My prediction? That the battle for consumer loyalty and cash will no longer take place in our conscious minds. The ultimate decision-making process of whether we buy something will happen at the deepest levels in the human brain. Until recently, these places were out of reach. But thanks to the unlikely pairing of neuroscience and marketing, we're beginning to understand the secrets of our own human Buyology.
Martin Lindstrom is the author of Buyology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy (Doubleday; 2008).
FORBES.com on 21/11/2008
Courier Mail:
Be immune to advertising tricks with logic
NEXT time you are about to buy something, take a moment to ask yourself why you want to take that particular product home with you. Is it the best product available on the market, the most expensive, or is it a bargain, on special offer, the cheapest of its kind?
Maybe you have always bought that product like your mother or father before you, or maybe you are trying something for the first time.
Whatever it is that makes you want to buy that product is what advertisers have been trying to tap into for years.
The traditional view is that emotion sells. If a product can generate a positive emotional response in you then that makes it attractive.
The problem for advertisers though in studying any emotional response is that it usually happens in the unconscious part of the brain, making it difficult to explain.
That is why international brand expert Martin Lindstrom spent three years studying the brain reaction of more than 2000 people who were bombarded with advertising, images and concepts. The aim was to discover what triggers an emotional response in the unconscious brain.
His findings are detailed in a new book Buyology - Truth and Lies About Why We Buy, out this month (Random House, $34.95).
This merging of science and marketing - known as neuro-marketing - worries some people amid fears it can be abused, similar to the concern over subliminal images or flash-frames in television and movies.
But Lindstrom believes the more we understand how the unconscious brain reacts to advertising, then the better armed we are as consumers.
"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," he says.
The book draws on other research, examples and anecdotes from across the advertising and marketing industry.
Lindstrom found the emotional response some people have to successful branding and advertising is similar to the response they have over faith and religion. Both rely on common themes such as a sense of belonging, sensory appeal, symbols, mystery and ritual.
The mystery factor he says crops up in some of the pseudo-science jargon that goes with advertising, in particular on some cosmetic products.
An old problem selling Guinness in British bars because of worries it took too long to pour was solved by creating a "good things take time" ritual about the time it takes to pour a Guinness. "That today is a ritual which 87 per cent of all Guinness beer drinkers feel is essential to follow when pouring out the beer, and not only that 90 per cent of those people feel it tastes better by doing it," Lindstrom tells The Courier-Mail.
Brisbane marketing guru Andre LePorte is a fan of Lindstrom's work.
"The only constant we can work on is stirring those emotions and making you feel better about something," says the freelance creative director and an expert in trendspotting.
Do that and you can sell water in bottles, fresh air in jars and even sunshine, he says.
If Lindstrom is right, and advertisers are going to better target triggers in our unconscious, the task for consumers is to make the conscious part of the brain aware of potential traps.
The difficulty here is that consumers are faced with more choice than ever before and more advertising pushing products.
In an attempt to see what it is like to try to ignore advertising's charms, Lindstrom is performing an experiment on himself by refusing to have the latest gadget mobile phone. Although the old phone still works very well it attracts many surprised comments.
He feels it puts him outside the "must have latest gadget" clique and that is something he admits makes him feel embarrassed.
"I'm involved in creating some of the most powerful brands in the world ... and I'm affected by it, too," he laughs.
"I find that interesting because it shows we are so cautious as human beings to portray the right information to our surroundings, to look more popular, to look more fancy, to look more rich or whatever it is."
If even the brand gurus are seduced, then what hope for the rest of us?
"The only way you can de-emotionalise yourself is not to be brand conscious," LePorte says.
He says the best way to avoid the brand hype when buying is to look at a range of similar products.
"Then I'd list all the attributes of the different products on a piece of paper and make sure I don't see any colour, images or words of spin," he says.
"That's the only way you can avoid making a decision based on emotions.
"But that's not what everybody will do, and that's what marketing and advertising is all about."
COURIER MAIL from 22/11/08
The Star:
Why aren't gruesome warnings enough?
Smoking kills.
And even while graphic health warnings on cigarette packages make that fact very clear, more than 15 billion cigarettes are sold around the world every day.
But why? It makes little sense that smoking rates are rising in spite of anti-smoking efforts.
According to global marketing guru Martin Lindstrom, Canada's cigarette package health warnings – ours are among the most aggressively icky in the world – can actually cause cravings.
"It's the Pavlov effect. I see that graphic picture and, 10 seconds later, I light up a cigarette. I feel good," says Lindstrom, who was in town recently to launch his new book Buy-ology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy.
After repeated "feel-good" experiences, he explains, an image of a decayed lung can – much like a tobacco company's logo – become closely associated with pleasure.
Anti-smoking TV ad campaigns have a similarly stimulating effect, Lindstrom says, but the reason is a little different.
It's because of "mirror neurons," which fire similarly in the brain whether you're lighting up a cigarette or watching someone else do it.
Since 80 per cent of anti-smoking ads show people smoking, they can trigger mirror neurons in a smoker's brain and, before he knows it, he's digging around in his pocket for a lighter.
This doesn't mean that the campaign to combat smoking has to start from scratch.
"I believe the Canadian health warnings can have some effect, because they're so graphic," he says.
"But they're not having the effect they could have because they're too consistent ...
"You have to have new pictures all the time, new placement, sometimes gone, totally random, so the brain can't link the feel-good feeling with the warnings."
This isn't just Lindstrom's theory. His statements are backed by a large neuromarketing study he did in partnership with Oxford University in which he hooked 2,000 volunteers up to brain-scanning technology.
By exposing his subjects to marketing and advertising strategies while monitoring their brain activity, he found out what works and what doesn't. And it was often surprising.
For example, most smokers reported in interviews that health warnings on cigarettes were a deterrent.
But brain scans showed the nucleus accumbens – the craving centre – lighting up.
The warnings had stimulated the area of the brain that activates when the body desires something, whether it's alcohol, drugs, gambling or sex.
Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) machines are commonly used in hospitals to diagnose tumours, strokes and joint injuries. When used by neuroscientists, they reveal which areas of the of brain are working at any given time.
These same machines are now quietly being used by marketers who want to tap into the real reasons people buy what they buy, since the prevailing marketing research techniques – focus groups and surveys – have so miserably failed to explain consumer behaviour.
"Neuromarketing, it's scary and exciting at the same time," says Lindstrom, whose book is an examination of this emerging marketing research technique.
He points out that this is an area that is not well understood.
Admitting that the technology may come across like "the ultimate intrusion, a giant and sinister Peeping Tom," he argues it has real value and not just to the marketers who are employing it.
Consumers could use information gleaned from brain scans to understand their own sometimes irrational behaviour.
And Lindstrom says such an understanding is becoming a cultural imperative.
In a world of shrinking resources and environmental degradation, we have a moral obligation to examine why we buy.
The results of Lindstrom's three-year, $7-million experiment disproved assumptions about many prevailing marketing techniques. He learned that product placements don't work, brand logos are dead and sex doesn't really sell.
But perhaps most important to Lindstrom were his findings about smoking.
In his view, neuromarketing helps explain why massive efforts by governments and anti-smoking activists haven't worked.
It's clearly a subject he feels strongly about. His book is unofficially dedicated to two smokers, his mother and his girlfriend's mother.
His girlfriend's mother died of cancer, and he writes in his book that counteracting powerful tobacco campaigns is a driving motivation.
STAR MAIL from 22/11/08
Evening Standard:
Fight back - we don't all have to shop till we drop
The fireworks are over, the Christmas decorations going up. In any other year, we'd now be headed into the big buying frenzy. Just 48 shopping days to Christmas left, all days being shopping days now.
Except it's visibly not working this time, interest rate cut or no. If you wander into the stores, there may still be people there but they are behaving quite differently. They have an air of detachment, even disaffection. They pick items up, look them over, check the price, and then put them down. They often head back out of the store empty-handed, their urge to buy defeated by their wish to save money.
That's the West End. The scene at Westfield is different. Westfield is London's colossal new temple to shopping brands and it's certainly wowing the faithful. There's real excitement in the air as the crowds pack in, exhilarated by its scale and the sheer concentration of totemic brands. But are they spending enough to justify the place's lavishness? Even if they are now, will they want or be able to carry on doing so in January, once the credit-card bills have arrived?
One of the unnerving things about Westfield is that it is perhaps not after all a glimpse of the future but already an anachronism, a vision of the way the future used to look when it was conceived, only a few years ago but now an age away. Maybe it's not the first jumbo jet but the last of the Zeppelins.
Maybe after so many years of becoming more and more enslaved to them, we are at last beginning to tire of brands, even ceasing to believe in them. We're all hoping there will be some positive outcomes from the recession, new starts, getting back to essentials. Binning brands would surely be one major benefit.
Not a hope, according to the self-proclaimed "branding guru" Martin Lindstrom. His revolting new book, Buy.ology, is a gleeful account of how neuroscience can now be used to detect just how brands affect the brain. It has been discovered that when test subjects view images associated with strong brands, such as the iPod, their brains register exactly the same pattern of activity as when they view religious images. The emotional engagement is similar, he says, delightedly.
Lindstrom is sure that "our national obsession with buying and consuming is just going to escalate, as marketers become better and better at targeting our subconscious wishes and desires".
So recession may offer no escape from consumerism - just an ever-more-tormented urge to buy and borrow ourselves into feeling better. It's certainly going to feel quite strange going shopping this Christmas. If only it wasn't too late to call the whole thing off. But that's never going to happen. Christmas is, after all, the brand of brands.
Conflict of interest
So far, only two lenders have declared their intentions to pass on to borrowers the full extent of the cut in the Bank of England's base rate, which is now down to three per cent. We shall see how others react today. Right now, some institutions have withdrawn their tracker mortgages, which vary according to the base rate, for new borrowers. And close scrutiny of the small print on these mortgages reveals that if the base rates fall below two per cent, the banks will have no obligation to pass on the savings — which means these mortgage payers would not gain from any further swingeing cuts that may be made in the base rate. In other words, when interest rates rise, the banks win. When they fall, the banks don't lose.
The apparent refusal of the banks to pass the benefits of the rate cuts on to borrowers and credit card debtors is politically damaging. The Bank of England has done its bit but the banks are not doing theirs.
That looks like ingratitude. And the banks cannot take refuge behind the inter-bank lending rate, which is simply based on an average of their lending rates to each other. Many are now in hock to the taxpayer; they should act accordingly.
And celebrating...
Remembrance. This Sunday is Remembrance Sunday; it is moving to see so many people proudly wearing poppies in tribute to the members of the armed services who fought on behalf of all. The conflicts are still going on and our celebration of the brave dead should also include the living
EVENING STANDARD (UK) on stands 7th of November 2008
Management Today:
Books: An Orwellian vision of neuromarketing
Brain-scanning as the key to understanding consumer motivation? Cilla Snowball prefers the intuitive approach.
Buy-ology: How everything we believe about why we buy is wrong Martin Lindstrom Random House £17.99
As we sit on the brink of a particularly unpleasant downturn, most of us are starting to give a lot more thought to the things we buy. We count our pennies and give careful consideration to the way we spend them. Or that's what we'd like to think...
As Martin Lindstrom points out in Buy-ology, our purchase decisions aren't as rational as that, and they never have been. Walking through a supermarket, we pick products from the shelves based on thoughts and emotions of which we are largely unaware. In a split second, we are drawn to a particular brand of shampoo or toothpaste without really knowing why.
For the person doing the buying, this doesn't present much of a problem. After all, life is too short and too busy to stand in the cereal aisle weighing up the merits of different boxes of cornflakes. Better to go with your instincts, grab one and move on.
For the companies doing the selling, however, it presents a big problem. And for anyone working in market research, the problem becomes almost maddening. People tell you that they'll definitely buy your new brand of furniture polish, but when they see it on the shelf, they don't. They said they wanted it, but, deep down, they didn't. As a result, most new-product launches fail.
Lindstrom believes he has the solution. By using the latest in brain-scanning technology, he has looked inside peoples' minds and seen the truth - the real motivations behind why we buy. What he has discovered, he claims, is as radical as Columbus finding that the world was round, not flat.
Unfortunately, this book isn't quite as groundbreaking as that. The subtitle claims to explain 'how everything we believe about why we buy is wrong'. In truth, it shows 'how everything we suspected about why we buy is right'.
Consider this question: how do peoples' brains react to the sound of Nokia's ubiquitous ring-tone? The brain-scans indicate that activity within the ventrolateral prefrontal cortices revealed a negative emotional response. In other words, people find Nokia's ring-tone annoying. Human reactions to an intrusive ring-tone in a meeting or on a train would tell you that, just as easily as a brain-scanner.
The discovery that imagery relating to the Apple brand inspires the same reaction in peoples' brains as religious imagery is interesting, if not astonishing. And it comes as no surprise to find that sponsorship dollars paid to be associated with US television programming are wasted if the links between the sponsoring brand and the programme aren't established properly. The findings confirm what we intuitively know.
The book goes on to predict that the mysteries of marketing will be unravelled by the rigour of neuroscience. Companies will start using brain-scanners to develop more irresistible products, and advertising agencies will in turn pinpoint the part of the brain they want to stimulate with their campaigns. It's an Orwellian vision where the art of persuasion is replaced by the science of manipulation.
Lindstrom is right in predicting that neuromarketing is here to stay. But I think, and hope, it will point to a very different future. It won't unravel any great mysteries. In fact, it will serve to remind us how mysterious people really are. We're complex and sensitive; we're driven by feelings and emotions.
The best things in life can't be developed in a laboratory, and a lot of them are in this book: the lovely feeling of an iPod in the palm of your hand, the wonderful anticipation of waiting for a pint of Guinness, the way the smell of Play-doh takes you back to your childhood.
So rather than becoming technical and systematic in the way we approach people, we will need to become more imaginative. We'll need to try harder to astonish, amuse, fascinate and delight them.
Although this book doesn't fundamentally change the way we think (thankfully), it is continuously thought-provoking. Lindstrom knits together facts and stories from his experiences around the world. He incorporates the findings from an eclectic range of studies - from the work of Damasio and Heath to BBDO's 2007 study of human rituals. And the whole piece is meanwhile enlivened by his energy and enthusiasm.
The book doesn't quite live up to the cover, but next time you're in a bookshop you might think about buying it. Who knows, you might even buy it without thinking.
Cilla Snowball is chairman and chief executive of the AMV group.
MANAGEMENT TODAY on the 1st of Novemeber 2008
Washington Post:
How Marketing Tricks You, and How to Beat It
We are the United States of Stuff Buyers. Seventy percent of our gross domestic product is tied to consumption. But these days, many of us are also short on cash, either literally or psychologically.
If we aren't looking for work, we suspect we might be soon. Investment portfolio balances are missing zeroes. Our capacity to consume, according to recent economic indicators, has been trampled.
It's the season to buy, though -- for Mom, Dad, the kids, Grandma, Grandpa and Uncle George. So this seems like the perfect time, with our shrinking capacity and willingness to spend, to ponder new evidence about why we buy what we buy, how retailers attempt to get us to buy more, and how we can be smarter with our money.
With the help of digital imaging like MRIs, scientists have made big strides toward understanding how our brains deal with financial decisions. Martin Lindstrom's fascinating new book, "Buyology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy," gets to the bottom of our buying habits, particularly our obsession with certain brands.
Lindstrom, a marketing guru who advises everyone from fast-food companies to drugmakers, partnered with Oxford scientists to conduct a three-year, $7 million study scanning the brains of 2,000 people while they were shown various marketing strategies. What they found surprised them. In one of the most startling examples, the researchers scanned brains while the subjects were exposed to images of popular brands and religious icons.
Lindstrom wrote: "The room went dark and the images began to flicker past: A bottle of Coca-Cola. The Pope. An iPod. A can of Red Bull. Rosary beads. A Ferrari sports car. The eBay logo. Mother Teresa. An American Express card. The BP sign. A photograph of children playing. The Microsoft logo."
When Lindstrom and the researchers analyzed the results, they noted that strong brands fired up activity in parts of the brain controlling memory, emotion and decision-making. That was expected. But then they compared those results with what happened when the subjects looked at religious images. To their surprise, "their brains registered the exact same patterns of activity," Lindstrom wrote. "Bottom line, there was no discernible difference between the way the subjects' brains reacted to powerful brands and the way they reacted to religious icons and figures."
This essentially means that when people line up outside Apple stores for the latest iPhone, they are not just hankering to get the latest gadget -- they are pretty much having a religious experience, too.
Another interesting insight into brands concerns our feelings -- yes, feelings -- when we sip a Coke. Lindstrom cites a study showing that when people know they are drinking Pepsi, the ventral putamen, a region of the brain that responds to appealing tastes, gets fired up. But the brain's response to Coke, which has for years inundated the world with advertising associating the beverage with warm memories of childhood, etc., was different. Not only was the ventral putamen activated, but so was the medial prefrontal cortex, responsible for higher thinking and discernment.
What does that mean? When we drink Coke, we get a certain warm and fuzzy feeling -- the emotions Coca-Cola has spent billions of dollars to create in advertisements. "Emotions are the way in which our brains encode things of value, and a brand that engages us emotionally -- think Apple, Harley-Davidson, and L'Oreal, just for starters -- will win every single time," Lindstrom wrote.
I asked Lindstrom whether he suspected that retailers and companies would lean on these associations in tough times -- he said yes -- and what shoppers could do to control themselves more. The advice was remarkably simple: Pay closer attention to what's happening.
He suspects that retailers, particularly grocers, will rely heavily on deals citing "limited quantities, act today!" He has done interesting studies with cans of soup. If they are priced $1.95 per can one day, the sales will be fairly standard. But the next day, if they are priced $1.95 with a tagline saying "maximum 8 cans per customer," sales surge. The offer triggers survival and hoarding behaviors in shoppers. Shoppers think the deal is so good that they should take advantage before others do. And for shoppers worried about losing their jobs, they think they should strike while they can.
Another way to avoid spending too much: Don't shop hungry. Not just for food, but for everything. Lindstrom said studies show that when we are hungry, we buy more. Again, our hoarding behaviors are triggered. He thinks retailers know this and will take advantage of it either by offering food during sales or by infusing the atmosphere with piped-in smells triggering hunger.
Perhaps the most important, and surprising, bit of advice Lindstrom offered was to physically change our shopping patterns. Many of us follow the same path through the grocery store or shopping mall, and when we do that, our brains essentially start to operate on auto-pilot. It's sort of like being on a long drive on a familiar stretch of road and you look up and think, "Did I just miss a stop light?"
When we shop that way, we don't pay close enough attention to how retailers and brands entice us to buy. So: Instead of always starting at the Gap, for instance, start on the other side of the mall and work your way there.
"You are waking up from the dream," Lindstrom said. "You are much more alert. You will also be more tired because you are using your brain more."
WASHINGTON POST on stands on 7/12/08
New Scientist:
Review: Buy-ology
ADVERTISING is a billion-dollar industry, but what makes some stuff instantly forgettable? Does sex really sell? And why would you buy that brand-new Mini over a better-value Audi? Based on studies that used a host of brain-scanning techniques, Martin Lindstrom delves into our heads to examine the advertising assault that plays on our hidden preferences and unconscious desires. In doing so, he uncovers the truth behind our decisions about what we buy. What he discovers is fascinating, if a little creepy. Read this book and take back control of your rational mind.
Appeared in NEW SCIENTIST on 6/12/08
Financial Times:
Mind-boggling marketing
What do smokers think and feel when they see gruesome pictures of diseased body parts and dire predictions of early, painful death on their cigarette packs? Smokers say the warnings put them off. But when their reactions were tested under a brain scanning machine, parts of the brain associated with intense craving flared into action on the scans. Even the most graphic health warnings might unwittingly encourage smokers to light up, the experiment suggested.
It is an intriguing finding from the biggest “neuromarketing” research project so far, a $7m study organised with university academics by marketing consultant Martin Lindstrom and reported by him in a new book, Buy-ology. The study was designed, in his words, to reveal “hidden truths behind how branding and marketing messages work on the human brain”.
Unfortunately, Lindstrom’s book is more speculation than serious science. Little of it actually reports on his own neuro-research; the rest consists of marketing war stories that are rehashed with speculative spin on unrelated topics such as mirror neurons and neurotransmitters.
Dopamine is a powerful neurotransmitter that gives us a sense of pleasure as we anticipate a reward. How and when it works and what its full effects are remain a subject of controversy, but Lindstrom is not deterred. According to him, all you have to do is look at a shiny digital camera and “wham, before you know it,” your brain is flush with dopamine and “a few minutes later, you exit the store, bag in hand”. Why, then, do we not buy every shiny object we see?
Mirror neurons could be the big neuroscientific discovery of the century. They are active in the same parts of the brain of someone observing an action as the brain of someone taking the action. Scientists believe mirror neurons could help gain a deeper understanding of human empathy, learning and imitation. But the research is only just beginning.
A defining feature of mirror neurons is the disconnect between the observer’s internal brain activity and his external, observable actions. But Lindstrom turns this into its opposite. You look at a Gap window display and see a picture of a gorgeous model wearing its clothes. Your mirror neurons make you imagine yourself as equally good-looking and “override” your more rational thoughts. “You just can’t help it”, declares Lindstrom, you go into the store and buy. Many Gap marketers must be thinking “if only Lindstrom was right”.
Lindstrom’s own research did not actually investigate the effects of dopamine and mirror neurons. But it did include functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging brain scans of people looking at brand icons and religious icons. He reports evidence that both trigger activity in the same parts of the brain, and uses this to draw the conclusion that the emotions generated by religious belief and by iconic brands are “almost identical”. That’s a huge claim. But according to Professor Gemma Calvert of Warwick University’s Applied Neuroimaging Group, who actually conducted the research, these particular results were only weakly statistically significant.
This year, Yale University researchers tested the ability of laymen and neuroscience students to distinguish between good and bad explanations of psychological phenomena. They performed well, except when bad explanations were prefaced with “Brain scans indicate ...”, when they accepted invented tosh as plausible. The researchers’ work is a timely warning as to how willing we are to be blinded by science.
There’s little doubt we have a lot to learn from neuroscience. But for this we need thorough, careful research accompanied by thorough, careful analysis and reporting.
Right now, the business world is awash with gurus bearing presentations and project proposals starting “Brain scans indicate ...”. The question for executives is whether the added neuroscience is really there to educate and inform, or to prise open executives’ marketing and research coffers by blinding them with science.
FINANCIAL TIMES from 17/12/08
Crain's New York Business:
Another age of excess bites dust
Soothing the father of the bride is part of Josyane Colwell's job, so the owner of Le Moulin Ltd., a New York event planner and caterer, was not surprised to get a call from a Wall Street executive about his daughter's big day. It was rife with details, which included a miniature wedding cake for each guest to take home.
But Dad had bad news: He was out $26 million and had to cancel the party.
Le Moulin is one of hundreds of small firms that rely on Wall Streeters' extravagant tastes and are now grappling with the adjustment. They are changing their marketing strategies, reconfiguring services, emphasizing value—even counseling clients themselves on how to deal with the transformation.
And though they are concerned about the retreat, some see a silver lining. For example, Ms. Colwell hopes that leaner times will be an antidote to the excesses of recent years, and she reminds clients that a simple party can be elegant.
“It's about the vision and how you present it,” she says. “Money never buys taste.”
A Mercedes trumps a Rolls-Royce in the new environment. Jim Monahan, owner of Madison Avenue Limousine, is providing less costly vehicles and is seeing more clients share cars to the airport or home after work. He is considering offering a “special” rate for one ride anywhere within Manhattan, as opposed to the two-hour minimum.
The less flashy have advantage
Creativity is the new byword. Concept Salon, on the Upper East Side, is giving a 20.08% discount to former Wall Street employees. Greenwich Village restaurant Cho Cho San now pegs the price of its “Wall Street Roll” (caviar and gold-leaf flakes) to stock market fluctuations: cheaper when the Dow tanks and more when it spikes.
Businesses that have always taken a less flashy approach than their competitors are ahead of the game.
Tom Sebenius, an arranger at Starbright Floral Design, in Manhattan's flower district, notes that brides are now more interested in seeing the numbers than they are in being pampered with Champagne in plush surroundings.
“Brides will come in and say they received quotes for $30,000,” Mr. Sebenius says. “We can offer the same quality, freshness and creativity for a half to a third of that.”
Incremental changes
Many exclusive businesses aren't revising their identities overnight but are beginning to alter their offerings in small ways.
Randy Wilson provides the lighting design for multimillion-dollar residences in such enclaves as Greenwich, Conn.; Manhattan's Gold Coast; and the Hamptons. He says clients are “ratcheting down” their projects across-the-board, for example, by substituting a less expensive material for Italian marble.
“One client said he'd still honor the contracts to do the work but wanted to rethink the installations,” Mr. Wilson says. “He basically told me, 'Do it, but shave $50,000 off the cost.' “
Over the past four years, HealthCoach has became a popular source of nutritious lunches delivered to Wall Street traders chained to their computers. The service now offers the meals one or two days a week instead of the previously mandatory five, according to founder Lisa Goldberg.
She also suggests that customers save money by forgoing bottled water with their order.
“Most people may cut back, but they stay,” Ms. Goldberg says. “When you're stressed out, that's the worst time to eat unhealthy.”
DISCOUNT PERIL
EXPERTS AGREE that businesses should forgo discounting merchandise or services and instead offer rebates and temporary promotions, such as a complimentary cocktail with a meal, or a free cut with color.
“Do not [reduce] prices,” says Martin Lindstrom, author of Buyology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy. “People get used to that.”
Retail consultant Pam Danziger, head of Unity Marketing, suggests offering coupons rather than discounting, or, as she puts it, “dumbing down” merchandise.
“[A coupon] forces you back into the store,” Ms. Danziger says. “I got one at Bergdorf's, and when I went back, spent double the amount.”
CRAIN'S NEW YORK BUSINESS on 6/12/08
Emirates Business 24|7:
Let the buyer beware
Martin Lindstrom was nine when he started building a Lego kingdom in his garden. At 11, he'd opened it to the public, and by the age of 12, he'd renamed it Mini-land, after a short visit from the Lego lawyers. He describes that moment as his first lesson in the importance of branding.
Twenty six years later, Martin is now a marketing expert, advising – and still occasionally upsetting – big companies. But for the last four years, his focus has been less on adverts, and more on what makes us buy. The results, published in his new book Buy-ology, are very revealing.
"I've always wanted to know things like, 'Why, in a world with less and less cigarette advertising, we smoke more and more',"
he says. "And four years ago I realised that to ask questions like that I needed to go much further."
After persuading eight multi-national companies to sponsor his work, he raised seven million dollars (Dh25m), hired 2,000 volunteers, 200 scientists and began asking: Why do we buy?
"No one has done this before because it's so incredibly complex and expensive," he laughs.
Using cutting-edge brain scanning equipment, Martin literally looked into the minds of thousands of volunteers; and by measuring brain activity, noted which adverts were having the most positive effect.
"There is a part of your brain called the nucleus accumbens," he says. "That is the craving spot or pleasure centre of the mind. This is activated when an advert is working.
"Using brain scanning techniques we discovered that people are irrational. Time after time, people would say one thing [about a product], and we'd look into the brain and see they were thinking the total opposite.
"We discovered that the best advertisers in the UK are the tobacco companies, followed by Guinness and Virgin," he says.
"These are the retailers who understand that we are emotional creatures and want to be seduced."
Martin has been fascinated by tobacco advertising for years. The advertising guru explains that he had never understood why, despite warnings on the packets and increasingly strict limits on advertising, people smoke more than ever.
"If you ask smokers, they say that warnings on packets discourage them from buying cigarettes. But our tests showed that what people say and what they actually think are two different things. In actual fact, those warnings make smokers want to smoke more. The words act as a graphic symbol that they associate with pleasure."
Martin also discovered that in some cases, advertising restrictions have made the tobacco brands more powerful.
"Silk Cut began to position its logo against a back ground of purple silk, when the cigarette advertising ban came in," he says.
"The logo became the silk. A survey in 1997 revealed that 98 per cent of customers could identify the product.
"Smokers now respond more positively to tobacco products, without a logo. They've learned to distrust the brand name itself, which they associate with the dangers of smoking. But their guards go down when the brand name is removed."
Martin adds that even our practical experience of products can be manipulated by our emotional relationship with the brand. "We labelled the same bottle of beverage with two different labels. When people saw the expensive label, they preferred the taste to the less expensive one even though they were the same. In the brain we could see that the person's pleasure levels went up, when they thought the wine was more expensive."
Considering the irrational nature of consumers, Martin wondered whether big companies were spending their advertising budgets wisely.
After asking his volunteers to watch an episode of the television programme American Idol, he discovered that two of the show's main sponsors were wasting their money.
"Ford, Coca-Cola and telephone company Cingular (now AT&T) sponsor American Idol, to the tune of 78 million dollars," he explains.
"But the volunteers showed less brand recognition of Ford, after seeing the show, than before."
Martin says the reason for this is simple.
"For many companies traditional advertising, with a logo at the end, is seen as the king of advertising. But in actual fact, subliminal messages are more powerful. During American Idol, Coca-Cola is present approximately 60 per cent of the time, in the form of set design and the bottle themselves, whereas Cingular pops in frequently and Ford use straightforward adverts in the breaks.
"Through brilliant integration, Coke painstakingly affiliates itself with the dreams, aspirations and starry-eyed fantasises of potential idols. Want to be high flying and adored? Coke can help.
"The biggest mistake companies make is that they think the consumer is 100 per cent rational," he adds. "They think we'll be triggered by discounts and logos. And yes, they may do for a short amount of time. But their loyalties will be as short as the percentage decrease. And in actual fact, the smaller your logo the more powerful it is."
To make it clear how emotionally attached we are to brands, Martin conducted an experiment. He compared how we felt about God, with our feelings for our favourite companies. He showed 65 volunteers, who had strong religious faiths, a mixture of commercial and religious images.
"When people viewed images associated with the strong brands – the iPod, the Harley Davison, the Ferrari and others – their brains registered the exact same patterns of activity as they did when they viewed the religious images," he explains. "There was no discernible difference between the way the subjects brains reacted to powerful brands than the way they reacted to religious icons and figures.
Martin believes that, 'in the future very powerful brands will be a religion'. "They will start to act like religions by implementing rituals. Inventing a common enemy, having a symbolic language – all those kinds of things. That's the reason companies such as Apple are already so successful. They've already got artificially created rituals to make you get emotionally involved with their brand. And the fantasy in your brain tells you that it won't taste or feel as good if the ritual isn't done the right way," he says.
Unsurprisingly, some companies aren't excited about Martin's research. In the last 18 months, he's had many tempting offers from tobacco companies to leave his work.
"They have a huge interest in stopping this project. They've contacted me many times. Their last email said, 'We know you don't want to work for us, but would you work with our marketing department?'"
But Martin is not going to be deterred. Currently working with governments, he wants to use his results to help make advertising bans and warnings more effective.
"Some of what we are working on is confidential. But I feel good about what I'm doing because it means this book is going to effect a change."
EMIRATES BUSINESS 24|7 on 6/12/08
The Oklahoman:
Scared into smoking
The state attorneys general who sued big tobacco companies were crowing last month about the 10th anniversary of the Master Settlement Agreement that's expected to generate nearly $250 billion in revenues over 25 years. Oklahoma Attorney General Drew Edmondson, who has his eye on the governor's office, was among those celebrating. And rightly so: The state's share will exceed $2 billion and much of that money goes directly into a trust fund from which only the earnings can be spent, primarily for anti-smoking campaigns. Trustees would do well to heed the advice of Martin Lindstrom in making spending decisions. Lindstrom, a marketing expert, says trying to scare people into not smoking has proven to be ineffective. Not only does the scare strategy fail to induce cessation, it sometimes leads to cravings for tobacco. This counter-intuitive conclusion is based on Lindstrom's research. His findings should be weighed in forging anti-smoking policy from Oklahoma all the way to the White House, where the next president will be a smoker himself.
THE OKLAHOMAN from 20/12/08
USA Today:
Best business books of 2008
Biographies, histories and books about marketing, management and investing were popular as always this year. But selections on Wall Street's meltdown took a special place on bookshelves as readers struggled to fathom what went wrong. USA TODAY Books Editor Gary H. Rawlins picks the best of the year:
Business biography/history
*The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life by Alice Schroeder. (Bantam, $35): Pries open the world of the Oracle of Omaha, whose life until now was nobody's business. Reveals a man of unimaginable personal complexity, who facilitates complete access to family, friends and business associates.
*Eccentric Billionaire: John D. MacArthur -- Empire Builder, Reluctant Philanthropist, Relentless Adversary by Nancy Kriplen. (Amacom, $24): How the name of a miserly self-made billionaire with dubious business ethics became synonymous with philanthropy.
*The Man Who Owns the News: Inside the Secret World of Rupert Murdoch by Michael Wolff (Broadway, $29.95): What marriage can do to change a conservative media baron politically. Murdoch's "life is now largely spent around people for whom Fox News (one of his media properties) is a vulgarity and a joke," the author writes. The catalyst: the 1999 marriage to third wife Wendi Deng, 38 years his junior.
*The First Billion Is the Hardest: Reflections on a Life of Comebacks and America's Energy Future by T. Boone Pickens (Crown Business, $26.95): A mishmash of his philosophy on effective corporate leadership, revelations about his personal life and countrified wisdom that Pickens calls "Booneisms."
*Call Me Ted by Ted Turner with Bill Burke (Grand Central Publishing, $30): Covers the Mouth of the South's successes and setbacks in television, movies, professional sports, championship sailing and marriage.
Management/leadership
*Inside Steve's Brain by Leander Kahney (Portfolio, $23.95): Offers insightful nuggets on Steve Jobs, who helped create personal computers and digital music while moonlighting as a modern-day Walt Disney at animation studio Pixar.
*Ahead of the Curve: Two Years at Harvard Business School by Philip Delves Broughton (Penguin Press; $25.95): A firsthand account of the nuts-and-bolts pursuit of the coveted MBA, a degree considered a passport to power and wealth.
Economic ideas, trends
*The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too by James Galbraith (Free Press, $25): An attempt to purge the liberal mind of the false economic idols of monetary control, balanced budgets and decreased government regulations.
*Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution -- and How We Can Renew Our Global Future by Thomas Friedman (Farrar Straus & Giroux, $27.95): Exhorts the U.S. to go full throttle to develop "green" energy sources as a way to cut off the flow of dollars to oil dictators, avert disastrous climate change, boost competitiveness and grow millions of jobs.
*The World is Curved: Hidden Dangers to the Global Economy by David Smick (Portfolio, $26.95): In financial markets, "We can't see over the horizon," the author writes. "We are always being surprised. And that is why the world has become a dangerous place."
Mortgage crisis/crime
*Chain of Blame: How Wall Street Caused the Mortgage and Credit Crisis by Paul Muolo and Mathew Padilla (John Wiley & Sons, $27.95): Leads readers down the subprime money trail and through the quagmire of what went wrong inside the nation's subprime-lending firms that led to the mortgage and credit crisis.
*The Return of Depression Economics by Paul Krugman (W.W. Norton, $24.95): How laissez-faire governing principles led to the worst financial crisis since the 1930s, and what policies are needed to respond.
*The Trillion Dollar Meltdown: Easy Money, High Rollers, and the Great Credit Crash by Charles Morris (PublicAffairs, $22.95): Traces the birth of "structured finance," the expansion of derivatives and the mathematization of trading, which flowed together to create the credit bubble that burst.
Investing
*The Smart Cookies' Guide to Making More Dough: How Five Young Women Got Smart, Formed a Money Group and Took Control of Their Finances by The Smart Cookies with Jennifer Barrett (Delacorte Press, $24): A quintet of twentysomething women move from being financially inept to experts when a "debt diet" episode of The Oprah Winfrey Show inspired them to form an investment club.
Marketing
*Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are by Rob Walker (Random House, $25): Argues that technology is diffusing marketing and making pitchmen of us all.
*Buyology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy by Martin Lindstrom (Doubleday, $24.95): Presents findings of a three-year neurological marketing study in which brainwave scans of 2,000 subjects uncovered truths that market research, focus groups and polls never came close to finding.
USA TODAY from 22/12/08
Toronto Star:
Bestsellers
Based on sales by 250 independent Canadian booksellers for the week ending Saturday, Dec. 13. Bracketed figures indicate number of weeks on list.
Business books
1(9) The Smart Cookies' Guide to Making More Dough The Smart Cookies 2 (7) A Whole New Mind: Why Right- Brainers Will Rule the Future Daniel H. Pink 3 (9) What Color is Your Parachute? 2009 - Richard Nelson Bolles
4 (4) Call Me Ted - Ted Turner
5 (455) Rich Dad Poor Dad Robert T. Kiyosaki
6 (6) Business Stripped Bare Richard Branson
7(1) Buyology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy - Martin Lindstrom
8 (1) Warren Buffett and the Interpretation of Financial Statements Mary Buffett & David Clark
9 (213) The Wealthy Barber David Chilton
10 (12) When All You Have is Hope Frank O'Dea
TORONTO STAR from 20/12/08
The London Times:
Bye-bye to buy, buy, buy;
Bye-bye to buy, buy, buy; Our primitive instincts drive us into a frenzy during the sales, but you can rein in that urge to splurge, says John Naish
Every year, the psychologist Tim Denison witnesses the same phenomenon - hordes of hyper-stimulated shoppers mesmerised into wasting millions on bargains that plainly aren't bargains.
All thanks to the Christmas sales sending parts of our brains crazy. "Your perceptions can get wildly distorted," he cautions.
Sales. The S-word is everywhere on our crunch-stricken high streets, and as we gear up for the traditional January bonanza, one thing is certain: many of those must-buys will turn out to be embarrassing blunders, thanks to the way our poor brains get bamboozled and bedazzled by the quick chance of a bargain. But there are scientific ways to safeguard your primitive grab'n' run instincts to help to ensure that precious cash is spent wisely rather than squandered.
Even in these days of cheaply available goods and seen-it-all-before shoppers, sales still spark our famine-fearing, feeding-frenzied instincts.
Last month in America a WalMart employee was trampled to death by rampaging bargainhunters.
And in 2005, the prospect of cheap sofas sparked a riot at Ikea in North London.
Resistance is futile We are all prone to this kind of panicked irrationality, says Denison, a retail psychologist at the global shopping-research company Synovate.
"In sales the prices that people pay for things goes out of the window. They are not interested in the price so much as the 'bargain'," he says. "There's a sense of getting rushed. You get mesmerised and assume that everything is far cheaper than it would be otherwise. You are swayed by the '75 per cent off' label rather than the price that you are paying." He adds: "Another reason for overspending is the fact that your perception of cost savings gets wildly distorted.
If you suddenly become convinced that you really want something, you may go for a 5 per cent reduction, whereas if you don't feel that bothered, you won't be moved by anything less than 60 per cent." Women are better bargain-hunters Men and women can be as bad as each other in the sales, though in different ways, Denison says. Men tend to be poorer at working out what the actual market price of things is, not least because they are generally less interested in shopping. Women, meanwhile, "tend to be better at recognising genuine bargains but are more prone to getting wound up by the razzamataz", Denison says. "They tend to get fixated on how much they have 'saved' rather than how much they've ended up spending." It's one reason why Anne Lord, a Brighton mother of two, always takes a notebook with her to the sales. "I walk around and if I see something I like, I make a note of what it is and where it is located. When I have finished my trawl of the shops, I go back around. If it's still there, and I still feel that I want it, I'll buy it.
Often when I see it again, I'll decide that it's not so special. And if it's gone, well, given the way things are going, there will probably be another on sale cheaper in a few months' time." Lord's strategy works because it is a way of being mindful in a situation that often precipitates mindlessness. "We know that roughly 90 per cent of our consumer behaviour is unconscious," says Martin Lindstrom, an international branding consultant and author of the brain science book Buyology: How Everything We Believe About Why We Buy is Wrong. And that's on a good day.
Ancient fears urge us to grab In the heat of a sales rush, "limited offers" create something called First World angst in our heads, when our ancient fears of scarcity and famine urge us to grab, grab, grab.
When we see crowds rushing after something, our primitive feasting response kicks in; we don't want the table to be bare when we get there. We also get ramped up on anxiety because we can see and even smell retail-frenzied anxiousness in others around us at an instant, subconscious level. This old instinct evolved so that we could detect if one of our tribe had spotted something nasty lurking in the grass, but now this anxiety contagion makes us want to grab even more - thanks to an ancient instinct to hoard things when faced with possible threats.
All this helps to explain why one study found that the stress levels of January sales shoppers are similar to those experienced by military pilots approaching a combat zone. Dr David Lewis, a cognitive neuropsychologist and co-author of The Soul of the New Consumer, says that his analysis of a survey of bargain-hunters shows that "crowds, rivalry between shoppers and determination to get that elusive bargain all combine to set hearts racing, blood pressure rising and, in extreme cases, cause full-blown panic attacks".
"Binge-buying" gives us a chemical kick Seeing and handling something we want to buy gives our brains a burst of the neurotransmitter dopamine, a reward chemical that is similar to heroin. The chemical high doesn't last long but you can stay high serially if you feel that the sales give you "permission" to keep buying and buying. In these straitened times, there is even social competition involved at the sales, in the shape of "spenvy" - discomfort caused by believing that your friends or family are actually better at snagging bargains than you. A survey of 2,000 shoppers for YouGov by Corinne Sweet, a consumer psychologist, showed that 78 per cent of us felt secret disappointment and guilt when others made their money stretch farther.
Paradoxically, this can make us rush out and spend harder, although ultimately less wisely.
Devise a shopping strategy Anne Lord's method is one of several scientifically proven strategies you can adopt to help to ensure that you leave the shops with crunchbeating bargains rather than costly blunders.
Researchers generally agree that it takes as little as 2.5 seconds to make a purchasing decision. So you need to take a break from the instant-grab reaction - and how better to distract yourself than with more browsing? If you find something you like, walk away and give yourself ten minutes to gain perspective, while examining other items. Even baboons use this sort of approach, says research by St Andrews University: on their gathering forays, they leave so-so foods untouched while they venture farther in search of top-quality items. If they can't find the best foods, they gather the second best on the way home.
Beware seductive Christmas colours Retailers tend to snag our attention by using red and white labels for January sales items, as they are associated with Christmas and good times, says Denison. It works, as shops that have tried using other colours have found to their regret.
Don't mistake those colours as automatically meaning bargain territory.
Take cash - and save money Studies have shown that paying with cash at the till is much more painful than having your credit card swiped. Handing over money stimulates regions in your brain associated with discomfort. Credit cards seem to anaesthetise this.
Bring your husband or boyfriend Men's stress levels soar during a hectic shopping spree. Studies indicate that men and women can shop together for about 70 minutes before they start to row. Men will have had enough, while most women will want to continue shopping for another half an hour.
John Naish is the author of Enough: Breaking Free From the World of More (Hodder & Stoughton)
LONDON TIMES from 27/12/08
Cleburne Times-Review (Texas):
OPINION: Never too old to learn things
Dec. 29--I've become quite the fan of the podcast these days.
For the unitiated podcasts are audio and video files that can be downloaded from the Internet and played on your computer or a portable device such as an iPod or some other type of mp3 player.
Loads of individuals created their own podcasts that cover about any topic you can imagine. Politics, various types of ethnic music -- I occasionally check out a Celtic music 'cast -- movie reviews, commentary on society, humor, language lessons, the list goes on and on, and began sharing them with each other. The phenomenon began mostly among iPod users, hence the name "podcast," but others joined in, included an array of commercial media.
Check the Web site for your favorite news outlet and chances are it offers at least one and possibly several podcasts. Your favorite cable station may offer podcasts as well, audio and video. Video podcasts can only be played on devices that support them, which should be an obvious statement, but experience shows that if you don't make observations like that, someone will try to download and run the video on a player not designed for it and then be upset because no one said it couldn't be done.
Sometimes the 'casts are short -- little snippets of information or portions of a program -- while other are complete programs authored by an individual or recordings of a commercial outlet's regular fare.
An interesting 'cast I heard recently was about "Buyology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy," by Martin Lindstrom.
Lindstrom researches what he calls neuromarketing, which involves doing brain scans to find out what we really respond to. He's discovered, for instance, that the adage "Sex sells" doesn't really hold up. Apparently we are so distracted by the beautiful men and women the advertisers use to seduce us into buying their products that we tend to forget the brand name of the product.
In another instance, the creator of a reality show came to Lindstrom to find out whether the project would succeed. In focus groups, the show did so poorly that viewers added a sixth choice to their surveys: too awful to watch. But Lindstrom's group performed brain scans on the viewers and discovered that as much as they said they hated the program, they unconsciously enjoyed watching it. Based on his research, the show's creators went ahead with the project, and it became a hit.
I'm guessing the show wasn't "Momma's Boys," which with any luck will die a merciful death. Of course that's just my rational reaction to the commercials. Maybe my brain scans would show a serious hankering for watching attractive young people make fools of themselves in front of mothers who appear to be about my age.
I also learned that the custom of stuffing a lime wedge into a certain brand of Mexican beer originated when a couple of college students in California decided to see if they could start a fad and see how fast it spread. And I thought the action came about because drinkers discovered how tasteless the beer was and decided to liven it up. In all fairness, I've never tasted that particular brand, with or without lime.
In the process, Lindstrom discovered that beer with the lime already in it doesn't sell as well, apparently because drinkers prefer the ritual of squeezing the lime for themselves. Go figure.
Despite all this high-tech research, consumers manifest a stubborn tendency to do what they want. Lindstrom's explanation is that when we're educated about and aware of the techniques marketers use on us, we become immune to it. His research has the dual effect, then, of making it easier for marketers to convince of the worth of their product and easier for us to ignore them.
But whatever saves us from the next New Coke is fine with me.
Podcasts can be enlightening, but I have to say the favorites on my player are vodcasts, video podcasts, from the show "Mythbusters." The hosts love to blow up stuff, and I have vodcasts of some of their more spectacular explosions.
I think Lindstrom's scans would find my conscious and subconscious minds agree that watching a water heater take off like a rocket is a most pleasurable experience.
CLEBURNE TIMES-REVIEW from 29/12/08
Business Today (India):
2008's most sold
BT culled India's top-selling business books of 2008 from the country's leading publishers. The result was an eclectic mix that ranged from management tips dispensed by global gurus to studies on consumer behaviour.
RANDOM HOUSE
Business Stripped Bare
Richard Branson
Price: Rs 535
Pages: 352
Swashbuckling business mogul and ace adventurer Branson shares riveting details about his most risky, brilliant and audacious deals. Branson explains how he tried to take on one of the world's biggest superbrands, how he plans to change the course of the world's rivers to cut carbon emissions and which businessmen around the globe he is truly in awe of.
Buyology
Martin Lindstrom
Price: Rs 539
Pages: 256
A groundbreaking study of what makes consumers tick, the author employed brainscanning technology to reveal what goes on inside our heads when we see an advertisement, or taste two rival brands of drink.
We learn, for example, that anti-smoking campaigns actually make people smoke and that product placement in films rarely works.
Creating Magic
Lee Cockerell
Price: Rs 306
Pages: 288
Cockerell shares the ten practical, common sense strategies that guided his own journey from a poor farm boy in Oklahoma to the head of operations for Walt Disney World Resort Operations. Cockerell packs in business wisdom along with insightful and entertaining stories that show us how we can all become better leaders.
HARPER COLLINS
Winning
Jack Welch
Price: Rs 295
Pages: 372
Winning is chockfull of management wisdom that super-CEO Jack Welch built up through four-and-a-half decades of work at GE. His advice focusses on cultural values such as candor, differentiation among employees, and inclusion of all voices in decision-making, to issues of hiring and firing as well as crisis management.
The One Minute Manager
Kenneth Blanchard and Spencer Johnson
Price: Rs 195
Pages: 111
Jim Blasingame:
Small Business Advocate
GUEST: Martin Lindstrom TOPIC: What do customers want during a slow economy? Martin Lindstrom joins Jim Blasingame to say that small businesses should not discounting their brands, but rather find other ways to give customers a good deal.
Independent Extra:
Passion for packaging
It's geek porn, the hi-tech equivalent of a striptease, and it's got thousands of grown men hooked around the world. Tim Walker lays bare the bizarre world of 'unboxing' videos
It has no production values, no nudity, and no laughs, and yet a three-minute silent video of a man opening a cardboard box has been watched online by almost half a million YouTube users. Why? Because inside the box, swaddled in plastic and polystyrene, is a brand new Apple MacBook Air; and because it's a particularly popular example of one of the internet's oddest video sharing crazes: unboxing. Every time a much-anticipated new technology product arrives in stores - be it an iPhone, a Wii, or a Vaio - one or more of the lucky few who get their hands on it posts a video online of themselves opening the box, layer by layer, to reveal the desired product within. Whoever produces the most titillating tape can generate tens of thousands of hits from the less fortunate - anybody who can't quite afford it yet. It's a pastime enjoyed almost exclusively by men, who sit alone salivating in front of their screens as the ecstatic climax of each unboxing clip draws closer. No wonder the phenomenon's principal exponent, Andru Edwards - chief executive of the specialist, Seattle-based website unboxing.com - calls it "geek porn". Indeed, his website's dedicated unboxing video channel, Unboxing Live!, boasts the tagline "Vicarious thrills from opening new gear." ("It's similar to an experience you'd have in a strip club," Edwards said. "It's stuff that you're lusting over - you can't have it, but you want it.") So popular are videos of the unboxing ritual that manufacturers now take note. While unboxing the Nintendo DS Lite in December 2006, for example, Edwards gave the thumbs down to the "invisible shield", a plastic sheet that protected the handheld console's screen, but also mildly muffled the speakers. Nintendo halted the production line and modified its product, before sending it back to Edwards for a second look. In August 2008, Samsung promoted its new Omnia i900 mobile phone by posting a fake amateur unboxing video on YouTube. In the clip, which is attributed to a fictitious technology blog called Technivator (but is in fact the work of digital marketing superstars The Viral Factory), the phone's box opens to reveal a miniature marching band, who soon explode into tiny fireworks before the touchscreen phone itself is revealed in a wash of dry ice. "The video was created as a tribute to the creators and viewers of unboxing videos," said Blake Harrop, Samsung Mobile's head of interactive marketing. "These people are the opinion leaders and lead users of our target market." The ad has since attracted more than 2.4 million views; the internet has shifted power decisively from the brands to their consumers. Martin Lindstrom, author of Buyology: How Everything We Believe About Why We Buy Is Wrong, is an expert in neuro-marketing, "where science and marketing meet". He claims the unboxing phenomenon is a result of so-called "mirror neurons": "Mirror neurons mean, in principle, that when I observe other people doing things, I feel that I am doing the same," he explains. "When I scratch my head, and you watch me doing it, the same regions in your brain will be activated as would be if you were actually scratching your head. "That's the appeal of unboxing: when you watch other people doing things on the internet, you feel like you're doing it yourself. It's the same as when we look at magazines of beautiful cars and dream of driving them, and it's the reason why women are still seduced by beautiful girls walking in TV ads, supposedly wearing a perfume. Unboxing is a very masculine dream, but girls watch, say, Sex and the City, which is a feminine version of it." Lindstrom advises his own marketing clients to make their packaging design as exciting as the product itself. Dopamine - a pleasurable brain chemical produced when we reward ourselves with, for instance, a luxury purchase - is released into our systems only fleetingly unless the product we buy involves sustained excitement, such as the psychological journey of an unboxing experience. Apple's classic packaging design makes it the unboxing market leader, but Lindstrom cautions against crediting the company with originating the trend. "Let's not be fooled here - the concept of the portable player came from the Walkman, and the MP3 player was around for six years before the iPod arrived. The iPod wheel was invented by Bang and Olufsen in 1986, but it forgot to put a patent on it. "Apple adapts a message very cleverly, about five minutes before it breaks through, and I have great respect for that. They've done it with packaging design, too, but in Japan you could have seen beautiful concept packaging design as long ago as the Seventies. It also appeared in the fashion and perfume industries long before Apple went into it." Apple and its rivals have made unboxing a mainstream pursuit, but they'll have to be careful: if too many of us discover that we can just stay in and watch a video, will we still bother to buy the company's beautiful gadgets?
INDEPENDENT EXTRA posted on January 14th, 2009
MSNBC:
Top 5 for the week of Jan. 26: Required Reading
1. "Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies" by Charlene Li
2. "The 7 Triggers to Yes: The New Science Behind Influencing People's Decisions" by Russell H. Granger
3. "The Complexity Crisis: Why Too Many Products, Markets, and Customers are Crippling Your Company -- and What To Do About it Now" by John L. Mariotti
4. "The Illusions of Entrepreneurship: The Costly Myths That Entrepreneurs, Investors, and Policy Makers Live By" by Scott A. Shane
5. "Buyology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy" by Martin Lindstrom
Appeared on the MSNBC website, Source: Smallbiztrends.com
Herald Sun (Australia):
Bargain with your brains
Don't be psyched out by tricks designed to make you spend, writes author Martin Lindstrom TODAY, more than ever, we have to be careful how we spend our money and be aware of methods we can use to avoid buying items of any kind that we neither want nor need, especially in the supermarket. To find out what happens in our brain when faced with a decision to buy or not to buy, I joined a committee of scientists in experiments to determine the answers. In my book, Buyology, I discuss these experiments and the surprising results. Here are five tips to help you shop wisely and spend intelligently. 1. Be careful of language that messes with your head Signs and words -- and the way they're used -- can have a powerful effect on our brains. I remember an experiment a store tried using cans of Campbell's chicken-noodle soup. The sign above the store display read $1``.95 per can''. Customers pushed right past. $1.95 sounded like far too much money for chicken-noodle anything. The next day, the manager replaced the first sign with one that left off the price and instead said, ``Maximum 8 cans per customer''. The result? Customers were waiting in line for their allotment. A small region in our prefrontal cortex (the front of our brains) is associated with collecting. Scientists believe it reacts as it did in an earlier time in our evolution, when supplies of food may have been scarce. Check your cupboards and count how many cans of soup and boxes of pasta you have. 2. Never use a shopping trolley People buy about 30 per cent more items when they shop with a big trolley. I believe consumers become self-conscious if their trolley contains, say, only a celebrity magazine and a few sticks of gum. It's almost as though we expect other shoppers to look down on us. My suggestion: avoid a shopping trolley altogether, or use a small basket with handles. Better yet, carry everything in your arms. 3. Leave the kids at home In supermarket and retail environments, consumers accompanied by children bought 40 per cent more items than consumers who were shopping by themselves. 4. Never go hungry to a supermarket Supermarkets know they can entice you into buying unnecessary items if you're shopping on an empty stomach. That's why more and more are installing bakeries, rotisserie chicken grilles, elaborate salad bars and snack-food outlets. Ever wonder why those aromatic supermarket bakeries are typically located so close to the entrance? The fragrance of just-baked bread not only gives off a signal of freshness, it evokes powerful feelings of comfort and domesticity. Smell is our most primal human sense. When we sniff something, the odour receptors in our noses make an uncensored beeline to our limbic system, which governs our emotions, memories and sense of wellbeing. Our gut response is so instantaneous we don't stand a chance. So bulk up before you go out. 5. Leave your credit cards behind Try not to bring a credit card to the stores. A debit card is OK, but when we slap down a credit card, we often feel as though we have unlimited money at our disposal. The US has about 17 million shopaholics. I define a shopaholic as one addicted to the feelings of reward, pleasure and wellbeing that the neurotransmitter dopamine produces -- and who has 200 pairs of shoes and five flatscreen TVs to prove it.
Appeared in the HERALD SUN on January 24, 2009
Forbes:
Love On The Cheap
Whether you're falling in love, out of love or just wish you had someone to love, Valentine's Day is an emotional time. Be careful that you don't let your heart lead you deep in credit card debt.
Everyone has different ways of dealing with emotional situations: Some of us will run 10 miles; some eat an entire pint of Ben & Jerry's (Chunky Monkey, anyone?), while some of us turn to the other type of pints.
And some of us will start firing up the credit card.
Unnecessary spending to compensate for something you are feeling is called emotional spending. If you just got in a fight with you boyfriend and suddenly find yourself swiping your card at Bloomingdale's, you're probably buying for the wrong reasons. You don't necessarily need to be depressed to pick up a new $100 pair of sunglasses. You may be happy, angry, in love or just plain bored. If you're an emotional spender you may find yourself turning to that protective piece of plastic rather than confronting what you're really feeling.
In his book Buyology: Truth and Lies About What We Buy, Martin Lindstrom cites a study that finds that half of all purchases are impulse purchases. Be especially aware of brash buys during Valentine's Day. This holiday has historically been a big spending day. And advertisements offering special deals and promotions are not going to let you off the hook: The National Retail Federation predicts the average American will spend $103 on love this year. While that's down $20 from last year, it's still a significant amount of cash--especially in our current economy.
Which brings up another point; V-day couldn't have come at a worse time. Many of us are still trying to bounce back from overwhelming holiday spending. For some this means digging ourselves out of debt. According to a November 2008 Consumer Reports holiday shopping poll, 12 million Americans were still paying off debt from purchases made the year before. It's hard to imagine that just two months after the holidays a new diamond necklace or plasma TV is a prudent purchase for many of us.
Moreover, the economy seems shakier than ever, and the job market shows no signs of improving. We're not in an ideal environment for unnecessary costs, even if they are incurred out of love.
Citizens-Times:
‘Neuromarketing' looks at brain for key to purchasing
In “Buyology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy,” the Danish consultant Martin Lindstrom addresses the “business science” of neuromarketing. The book explores the mind of today's consumer by trying to uncover “what truly influences our decisions to buy in today's message-cluttered world.”
The author spearheaded a global research study that took three years, $7 million (funded by eight unnamed companies), 10 professors and doctors, 200 researchers and an ethics committee to complete.
The study involved scanning the brains, via MRI, of 2,000 volunteers as they were exposed to various ads, logos, brands and products to determine what “seduces our interest and drives us to buy.”
Lindstrom claims that the research reveals that eight out of every 10 products launched in the United States are destined to fail. He claims that companies don't understand consumers and that by tapping into their brains one can uncover what motivates them to buy.
One of Lindstrom's favorite questions is, “Does product placement work?”
Product placement is when a branded item shows up in a movie or television show, such as the starring role for Reese's Pieces “E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial.” Today, viewers hooked on “American Idol” get a heavy dose of ads for Coca-Cola, Ford Motor Co. and Cingular Wireless (since bought out by AT&T), each of which spent an estimated $26 million a year to have their brands featured on the popular television show. Not only do Coca-Cola and Cingular Wireless run ads during commercial breaks, but they also display their products during the show itself. Ford doesn't “share the stage with contestants” as it only runs ads.
When the research examined the effects of “American Idol” ads, the results showed Coca-Cola was much more memorable to viewers than Cingular Wireless, and Ford was more or less forgotten. Lindstrom concludes that Ford doesn't play a role in the show itself, whereas Coca-Cola has cups sitting in front of the judges, bottle-shaped couches and red walls in the contestant waiting room.
Lindstrom's book is filled with stories about how we respond to brands (Marlboro, Nokia, McDonald's, Nike and Calvin Klein, to name a few) and attempts to uncover answers to even more questions such as:
• How powerful are brand logos?
• Does subliminal advertising still take place?
• Is our buying behavior affected by the world's major religions?
• What effect do disclaimers and health warnings have on us?
• Does sex in advertising work and how could it possibly get more explicit than it is now?
He predicts that traditional marketing research — questionnaires, focus groups, surveys, etc. — are on the way out and neuromarketing will become the wave of the future as a way to predict the success or failure of a company's products. And as its popularity and demand increase (which has yet to be seen), neuromarketing will become cheaper, easier and more available.
Lindstrom believes that neuromarketing can uncover the “buy button” — those products with the “highest chance of succeeding by pinpointing the consumer's reward centers and revealing which marketing efforts were most stimulating, appealing or memorable and which ones were dull and unforgettable.”
Lindstrom has written a book that is thought-provoking but controversial, since neuromarketing could give companies new ways to look into our brains and shape what we purchase.
Many companies, consumers and readers may not buy into it.
Appeared in Asheville's Citizen-Times on April 12th, 2009.
BT Upload:
Why do we buy?
Despite companies spending millions on research every year, every nine in 10 new products fail. The reason? When consumers say one thing they mean another. That’s what Martin Lindstrom found researching his new book Buyology. The most recognisable aspect of a brand is often the logo, but that automatically puts our guards up as we know we are about to be ‘sold to’. Martin suggests businesses should rely less on the logo and more on indirect signals such as colour, picture styles, shapes or sound. ‘In fact sound is the most important sense to consumers followed by smell and then sight. As most of today’s communication is visual, many businesses are wasting time and money,’ he argues. ‘They need to change their approach.’ ‘I think companies need to ask themselves what is left of their communications if they remove the logo from all products. Would customers be able to recognise who they are without it? The Coca-Cola bottle is a great example of when a company no longer needs its logo to stand out from the crowd.’
5 to make marketing work for you -Don’t depend heavily on your logo -Use all five senses to attract customers -Share your audience with other businesses to increase your reach -Think ‘context’ ie send the right message at the right time -Respond to world events through your marketing.
Appeared in the Winter Edition 09 of UPLOAD magazine
