Yes, I've discovered this in the morning. Based on analysis of my blog - text - Typealazer returned the type I am. Funny enough I've never perceived myself as logical person. And ouch! It hurts I am not very good at understanding other people's needs. Try it yourself and see your real blogger brain :-) . It is even better than neuromarketing, cheaper at least.
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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Interesting post from Neuromarketing blog about the danger of asking people what they did, why they did it. Brain isn't straightforward and linear as we would like to believe. Brain likes being mischievous.So researchers should be suspicious of answers given by people asked to explain their behavior or recall the past behavior - are we hearing the truth, or The Interpreter?
Tags: neuroscience, brain, research
I love this story. I have told it to all people I know and who believe that humans are very rational. Hell, no! We are far from being rational and this research is a good example of our irrationality. Brain can work very mysterious ways. Researchers at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and the California Institute of Technology found out that people’s brains experience more pleasure when they think they are drinking a $45 wine instead of a $5 bottle when in fact it the same wine. People actually experience wine to taste better, they don't rationalize that the better taste is connected with the higher price.
"What we document is that price is not just about inferences of quality, but it can actually affect real quality," said Baba Shiv, a professor of marketing who co-authored a paper titled "Marketing Actions Can Modulate Neural Representations of Experienced Pleasantness," published online Jan. 14 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "So, in essence, [price] is changing people's experiences with a product and, therefore, the outcomes from consuming this product."
There are a lot of available studies showing that people value and enjoy product more, the higher the price. Of course the line is thin here and one can risk that too high price levels actually scares people instead of attracting them to buy product.
Cheers! And keep on hallucinating. Expensive wine is tasting delicious.
Via Stanford News Service
Picture by Jeff Kubina
Tags: research, neuromarketing, wine, price
People aren't irrational only when buying on eBay. We are pretty far away from being rational even when thinking about prices.
A recent paper in the Journal of Consumer Research indicates that we tend to act as the lower digits were farther apart than higher ones.
"Students who saw ads showing a $233 skate marked down to $222 thought
they were getting a larger discount than did students who saw a $199
skate marked down to $188, even though the opposite was true. The first
group of students also rated themselves about 20 percent more likely to
buy the skates than did the others."
We aren't as clever as we tend to believe. Irrationality is very important when observing and analyzing human behavior. It also makes advertising kind of difficult as it is hard to predict, control and influence irrational behavior.
Via NYTimes
Technology sneaks everywhere and allows us to do the wildest things. I have recently found out that you can create subliminal messages! All you have to do is to download the free software and begin that will brainwash yourself or your boyfriend into buying you flowers :-) by flashing "text messages, pictures, or both in the center of the display, on top of everything."
I wonder how long does it take before anyone gets an idea to make a virus out of it. If you read Gladwell's Blink, you know how powerful unconscious mind is. Scary, especially that "scientists at the University College London (UCL) have found the first physiological evidence that invisible subliminal images do attract the brain’s attention on a subconscious level. The findings challenge previous scientific assumptions that consciousness and attention go hand-in-hand. What’s interesting here is that your brain does log things that you aren’t even aware of and can’t ever become aware of,” Bahador Bahrami from the UCL said. “We show that there is a brain response in the primary visual cortex to subliminal images that attract our attention without us having the impression of having seen anything." (From Subliminal messages ‘impact on brain’)
Tags: subliminal, neuroscience
I haven't noticed myself to experience any pain while I am shopping, but who knows what happens in my brain while I am browsing the shelves with shoes and bags. According to the latest research by George Loewenstein, high pricing causes higher activation levels in a brain areas associated with pain. But it is not just what's ever pricing we are talking about. There are a few interesting exceptions here. First of all, the pain we experience doesn't depend on the amount we are supposed to pay, but on the context of transaction. The perceived fairness or unfairness of the deal creates the painful reaction. The reaction doesn't occur when we buy the luxury goods, like cars.
The team of neuroscientists have developed a system that analyses brain activity to work out a person's intentions before they have acted on them. More advanced versions may be able to read complex thoughts and even pick them up before the person is conscious of them. It is possible with the computer that learns unique patterns of brain activity or signatures that correspond to different thought and then it scans the brain to look for these signatures and predicts what the person is thinking.
They will know you cheated on the test, they will know you want to write the hate post against Dell, they will know you are against the high taxes...
I am a huge fan of neuroscience but I guess such a findings rise the question about ethics. It is fascinating how we become better at mapping human brain but at some point we need to be clear about our freedom.
It makes me wonder where the curiosity, scientific knowledge ends and manipulation, invasion into the most private spheres begins? This is the very thin red line we are playing with. I am far away from having Orwellian thoughts, and even though we are still far away from mind-reading, we need to discuss ethics in tact with pseudoscientific discoveries. What I fear most is the misuse of such a impressive technologies to the wrong purposes.
via Guardian
We are running all of the time all the time. Sometimes we wish the days to be longer then 24 hours. We sleep for 1/3 of our lives, it leaves us only 2/3 to make all those things we wish and want to do. I can tell, it is not enough. We try artificially to extend the time we have: we drink coffee, lots of coffee, we reduce the time we sleep, we cut on some "unnecessary" social activities, like family dinners, and we multitask.We multitask because we believe that less can be turned out into more. Yes, I do multitask myself, hmm...even now. Stereo is on and I write to the sound of Mahler's V Symphony, the gmail notifier is active, so I can check out if there is anything new in my inbox and of course my mobile is in my pocket, so I can feel it when someone calls me up or sends me a message. Besides I am also ON, to say it straight around 90% of the time I am up. Sometimes I don't even turn out my laptop or phone when I do yoga or meditate at home (I know that's very bad habit! Shame on me!). I read those words, look around me and I think it is pretty scary. I feel constant lack of time and I think that if I do four or more things at the same time I stretch the time I have or manage to do more things within the shorter period of time. Unfortunately, this is not true.
The truth is that the brain can't handle multitasking. What really happens when we are trying to kill two (or more) birds with one stone is that our brain switches among tasks instead of processing them. We can talk and wash dishes or walk at the same time without a problem, but these activities are "highly practiced skills" and we don't think have to think while doing them. Other, not practiced skills need concentration and effort from our side. That's why it is more likely that we make mistakes while both writing e-mail to the client and using messenger to chat with the colleague from other agency . In fact multitasking doubles or triples the time or more to get the tasks finished than if we were done them sequentially, one after another. Our brain has its limitations for processing information while we multitask.
Another interesting finding is that brain stimulation is bell shaped. Just think about all those times while you were sitting with the important presentation, that should be finished tomorrow before lunch. The more coffee you drink the more stressed you get and in the end you lose it. It can be your presentation is done but this will not be the best job you ever done. The less stimulation can boost performance of the brain but too much of it can be too stressful to it.
Multitasking isn't healthy for our brain and sooner or later it will say stop. We take our brain for granted. When we strain the muscles too much they will ache, the brain won't make us feel the pain in such a direct way.
We should never forget that the brain also needs time for relaxation and doing nothing (actually doing nothing is important for memory processing).
So be more friendly for your brain Guys! And if you would like to learn more about that fantastic organ we have, watch the movie :-)
Inspired by Time's article Multitasking Generation
Tags: Brain, Multitiasking, Neuroscience
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Grant McCracken: Transformations: Identity Construction in Contemporary Culture
Philip Zimbardo: The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil
Duncan J. Watts: Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age (Open Market Edition)
Albert-Laszlo Barabasi: Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means
