'Resistance is futile': Beware of Neuromarketing
Forget focus groups, marketing studies or even psychographics, 2009 is the year the selling juggernaut will use neuroscience and our own biology against us.
Or rather that's Buy-ology, the name of book by marketing mastermind Martin Lindstrom who recounts his findings from a massive brain-research project exploring why we buy. Appealing directly to the brain's buy impulse is called "neuromarketing," and he spent three years and $7 million, using both CT scanning and fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) technology, to examine how people's brains respond to advertising and marketing ploys.
Lindstrom's findings echo those from some of the psychological strategies, but a surprising amount of the hard science shows that much of the most effective advertising is actually counterintuitive.
For example, health warnings on cigarette packs actually make people long to smoke. In Lindstrom's studies, the sight of these warnings prompted the "craving" center of the subjects' brains to light up. Apparently, there's a subliminal appeal. People love cigarettes, and anything associated with them -- even dire warnings -- will get them salivating like Pavlov's dog. That includes the colours of cigarette packages.
Excluded from the usual ad venues, tobacco companies are way ahead on the subliminal advertising path. They pay attractive businesses such as smart cocktail lounges or NASCAR competitors to adopt package colors, which triggers the craving center of the brain. Suddenly a patron in a gold and burgundy bar has an inexplicable urge to smoke. Cigarettes that feature a rugged individualist cowboy have also branched out into clothing and accessories with heartland style.
Lindstrom says this sort of subliminal advertising is actually more effective than conventional ads -- again, they can tell from the brain scans -- because it doesn't cause the consumer to put up a guard. The site of logos, brand names, or anything overtly connected with selling, such as a TV commercial, engages the conscious mind. Adults are taught to be skeptical. But the subconscious, it seems, is more like a toddler: easily seduced by anything that addresses primal emotional needs.
Sex slows sales
So what works for marketers and against you?
Sex, it turns out, doesn't sell (despite what every editor says). All that erotically charged imagery actually overwhelms the brain, which can't recall the product. What does work is sex with emotion, particularly sex with controversy. (Or as P.T. Barnum is alleged to have said, "There's no such thing as bad publicity as long as they spell your name right.")
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