Me and My Harley Jesus Davidson
Why do we choose Coca Cola over Pepsi or Apple over Dell? Price, promotion, I can hear some shouting. In fact, we as consumers ask ourselves those question very rarely, if never.
Martin Lindstrom decided
to find out what lies behind the success or failure brand experience
nowadays. To find out the truths and lies about consumer behavior, he
conducted 3 years long and 7 mil. USD worth research that involved
brain scanning of 2000 people from 5 countries who were stimulated by
commercial messages and wrote Buyology.
Lindstrom’s starting point was a hypothesis that people lie when asked about their consumer preferences while brain scans show the truth, black and white. There is the reason why companies should find out what consumer think and want by scanning their brains. It sounds simple and promising. The Promised Land for marketers that could solve and improve efficiency of marketing investments.
There are lots of proofs in the book, pulled to support the hypothesis.
Proof #1 Lindstrom tested smokers and find out that they weren’t influenced by the warnings at the cigarettes boxes at all. It appeared that those warnings had an opposite effect – made smokers crave cigarettes. Maybe, it is not surprising when we take into consideration the fact participants weren’t allowed to smoke for the 4 hours.
Proof #2 Lindstrom concluded also that strong brands like Apple, Harley Davidson, etc. activates the same areas in the brain as the religious symbols. Is there potential for co-branding wit Jesus & Co?
Proof #3 Sex doesn’t sell. I wasn’t surprised again as I grew up in catholic family and spend some time in church and religion lesson with bitter nouns trying hard to convince us that sex and religion don’t fit together. Many internalized that in fear of sinning. Back to Buyology. Martin Lindstrom inferred that people in little clothes and provoking poses don’t convince us to buy products…but hot models with naked torsos from Abercombie & Fitch do.
This is here my neo cortex began to light and blink for serious.
There are plenty of conclusions in the Buyology. From using religious symbols and rituals in advertising to create the feeling of tribe and belonging, through mirror neurons as explanation for the success of brands like iPod to the final conclusion that our behavior is driven also by unconscious motivations. Well, this is something we knew before Buyology hit the market.
One may wonder what is then the reason of Buyology's popularity.
Through many years, we’ve heard over and over that over 50% of our advertising investments were wasted, that 1 out of 10 new product launched fails, because we don’t really understand consumers and forces that drive their behavior. In order to understand consumers, it is necessary to look beyond surveys and focus groups, as people and their behavior are unpredictable and can’t be captures into questionnaire schemes. We aren’t rational as we believed and majority of our decisions happens on the subconscious level. In other words, we know that we don’t know what we know.
That knowledge makes marketing and advertising people scared and helpless. There is an urgent need to disenchant the world. Here come techno shamans in the picture with advanced, million worth devices to make the unpredictable and intangible into predictable and tangible. Neuromarketing is hot because it comes with a promise to explain the world of consumers that is difficult to control and to give the solutions. It awoke the hope for finding the buy button in human’s brain.
Lindstrom rides on this neuromarketing trend and promises to reveal the truths and lies of why we buy. For this purpose, he uses available knowledge about human brain that identifies different areas responsible for different feeling, like love, reward, fear, etc. When those areas are stimulated, they lit up but there is no explanation what kind of behavior will follow or how the environment or part experiences stimulates the reaction the scanned persons. To use that knowledge as an explanation is like looking into people’s windows from the street and trying to guess what they are talking about.
There are more questions than answers about our brains. We have no access to all processes happening there and we are not able to decode many of information we can see.
Of course, Martin Lindstrom can’t do it either. He just theorizes and jumps to vague conclusions based on a light he and his team saw on brain picture. There was not once asked a critical question towards the results or an attempt to find out what could cause the given area lit up. Like in the story of product placement in American Idol. According to brain scanning’s Coca Cola was the most successful brand and was most memorable. Ford was the worst and Lindstrom is sure they wasted 26 mil. USD and while he gives advice on how to use product placement, he forgets completely to look beyond the picture of brain he captured and consider the heritage and place in the humans life Coca Cola has.
The book seems to me one-dimensional and filled with cognitive shortcuts. It makes it difficult to perceive it as serious science.
However it is full of
digressions that show Martin Lindstrom has been a long time around
and knows a lot about marketing and advertising and there are also a
few anecdotes that are good to tell at family parties to entertain
family members as long as they don’t have the faintest idea what we
do.
Martin Lindstrom’s Buyology is worth reading as an entertaining pop book, but it is not to be perceived as the revolutionary or helpful tool in marketing. There is a long way to go and discover before it can gain that status.
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