Inside the buyer’s brain

In "Buyology" Martin Lindstrom seeks to understand why purchasers buy what they buy. Rather than rely on traditional methods, he attempts to find an answer by getting inside their brains

	Title:	Buyology
	Author:	Martin Lindstrom
	Pages:	256pages
	Publisher:	Random House
	Price:	$24.95

Buyology, Martin Lindstrom’s most recent book, is based on the premise that when one asks buyers why they choose certain brands, one cannot trust what they say. This isn’t because purchasers turn into liars when confronted by a marketer’s questions. It’s because, to a large extent, purchasers don’t really know why they are settling on the product that they are buying.

They don't know – and knowing is a function of consciousness – because it’s a web of subconscious forces that is mandating a decision for them. So Lindstrom sets out to study “the subconscious thoughts, feelings and desires that drive the purchasing decisions we make each and every day of our lives”. The explanation of subconscious buying he calls ‘buyology’.

At the core of buyology is something that has been developed over the last fifteen years, namely neuroimaging. With it, neuroscientists have made it possible for Lindstrom to get inside purchasers’ brains.

Traditional marketing research, quantitative or qualitative, used to have to rely on what people said. The newest form of research, neuromarketing, aims to see what they are really feeling. It works with neuroimages rather than market surveys or focus groups.

Martin Lindstrom is at the fore of, well, applied scientists striving to mate marketing with neuroscience. His research project is designed to “explore what the concept ‘brand’ really means to our brains…[and] help each one of us understand what is really going on inside our brains when we make decisions about what we buy.” To provide the neuroscientific analysis of responses to marketing experiments, he linked up with two neuroscientists: Dr. Gemma Calvert (Chair of Applied Neuroimaging, University of Warwick) and Dr. Richard Silberstein (Chair of Cognitive Neuroscience, Swinburne University, Melbourne). Neuroimaging (see Chart) is not cheap and so it took Lindstrom several years to gather some $7 million of funding from 8 multinational in order to conduct his experiments. These involved 2,081 volunteers, resulting in 1,979 steady state topography (SST) studies (overseen by Silberstein) and 102 functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans (overseen by Calvert).

Product placement and TV advertising
Are product placement and TV advertising as effective as their ubiquity would lead us to believe? Lindstrom decided to apply neuroscientific tools to the case of American Idol, an American TV show based on the UK’s Pop Idol. Three companies, Coca-Cola, Ford and Cingular pay over $20 million yearly to advertise on the show. But they do it in different ways and Lindstrom wanted to see how those methods compared in effectiveness – that is, in terms of brand recall.

First, the different methods. Coke runs thirty-second ads but also has the judges sipping their drink, has the contestants sitting on couches shaped like Coke bottles and has the walls painted a Coke red. Cingular runs ads and is present on the show, though less than Coke. For example, viewers are reminded that they can vote via text-messages from a Cingular phone. Ford, by contrast, is present only via a thirty-second ad spot.

To probe this set-up Lindstrom and the neuroscientists devised an SST test to examine brand recall, the phenomenon generally regarded as the most reliable measure of an ad’s effectiveness. The result was that Coke was far more memorable than Cingular which, in turn, was more memorable than Ford. Why? Lindstrom hypothesises that Coke was fully integrated into the narrative of the show, Cingular somewhat, and Ford scarcely. Coke created greatest recall by being part of the show while Ford lagged due to its mere fringe participation.

Lindstrom draws a product placement lesson from this. Product placement can be effective only if it is a fundamental part of the story line. In Spielberg’s film E.T. for example, Reese’s Pieces were not a fleeting incidental but were a part of the story line. To take a hypothetical case, placing a brand of women’s boots may not work in a Bruce Willis move, but placing gym equipment in it could very well succeed.

Subliminal advertising
Subliminal advertising designates the practice of inserting extremely short visual or auditory messages within longer visual or auditory messages. Those short messages lie beneath our level of consciousness. The practice can be overt or covert. An overt example is provided by a Kentucky Fried Chicken ad which played at full speed plugs its Buffalo Snacker sandwich but played at slow speed reveals a code usable to get a free Snacker. But subliminality is usually used covertly. For example, a George W. Bush ad against Al Gore’s health plan ended with the tag line “Bureaucrats decide”. As a voice utters “Bureaucrats decide” a split second image of the word “rats” appears.

Lindstrom wanted to further investigate the role of information that lies beneath our level of consciousness in forming our behaviour. He set up an experiment with smokers to see whether cigarette craving could be triggered by images tied to a brand of cigarette but not explicitly linked to smoking a cigarette. He had the volunteers look, but only look, at cigarette packs (Marlboros and Camels), at logos (i.e. explicit messages), but also at images associated with the brands (cowboys, camels in deserts, etc.).

The explicit messages revealed pronounced activity in the brain region known as the nucleus acumbens, the area involved with craving and addiction. The brand-related images also created activity in that region, but created more activity in the visual cortex, the area responsible for visual processing. The logo-free images were more effective (in triggering craving) than the logo-ful messages. For cigarette advertising the hierarchy of effectiveness was, running from most to least: image without logo, logo with warning, logo without warning. It would then seem, though Lindstrom does not make this point,  that governments wishing to discourage smoking should 1) encourage cigarette advertising but 2) limit it to fully-branded with no warning.

Religiosity and brands
Another practice that is not consciously rational is the ritual. Rituals are employed in the rationally unfounded belief that they have the power to affect the future. They stem from the longing for a sense of control in a changing, overwhelming world. Which brings us to brand loyalty that may be seen as a kind of ritual. Light up, and everything will come up roses.

Some companies have managed to build brand loyalty around certain rituals. For example the Mexican beer Corona has become associated with the ritual of inserting slices of lime, tipping the bottle and taking a sip. Guinness managed to transform a long pouring process into part of the Guinness drinking experience: an artful pour to achieve the perfect pint. The American cookie Oreo has thought up multiple rituals such as prying open the cookie, licking the frosting and then eating the wafers, or keeping the cookie intact but dunking it in milk. Subconsciously people then find themselves ritually buying Oreos and ritually quaffing Guiness.

Among all human institutions, religion relies particularly heavily on rituals. Lindstrom wanted to examine the link between religion and marketing. Accordingly he set up an experiment to delve into this problem. In it he used leading brands (exciting ones such as Harley-Davidson and less exciting ones such as BP), sports figures and religious images. When test participants were exposed to images of powerful brands, their brain activity occurred in the same region as when exposed to religious images. Weaker brands triggered activity in different parts of the brain. Strong brands have the same neurological effects as great religions. So if you want to pitch something alluring at the consumer public, it may pay to show ‘em the pope riding a Harley—it says here.

Can neuroscience predict success?
52% of all new brands and 75% of individual product fail within the first year of their launch, according to a study by the IXP marketing Group. Some of these products were viewed as too-good-to-fail. For example, the Segway PT, a revolutionary personal transporter, has not met glorious expectations. New Coke was a controversy-generating flop in the 80s. RJ Reynolds recently invested over $300 million to create a smokeless tobacco, Premier, which never took off.

So Lindstrom tried exploring whether testing could foretell what consumers will like. As a stab at this he organised an experiment around a popular British quiz show, Quizmania. Two hundred American volunteers were then shown a Quizimania pilot – one half viewing it along with a proven success (How Clean is Your House?), the other half got to watch the pilot and a proven failure (The Swan). As they attended the showings they were asked to complete a questionnaire.

The experiment showed a discrepancy between the questionnaire and the brain scans. On the questionnaires, the volunteers claimed that they were more or less as likely to watch How Clean is Your House as The Swan. But their brain scans showed more engagement with How Clean is your House.

As for Quizmania, the volunteers claimed it was the show they would be least likely to watch. But the SST scans told a different story. Quizmania created a greater degree of engagement than the Swan, although less than How Clean. The subject’s brains told a different story than their avowals.

It is a shame that Lindstrom could not have performed the same experiment with Pop Idol. The story goes that Rupert Murdoch did not believe that an American version of the show would work, but his daughter convinced him to try. Thus was American Idol born. Lindstrom would no doubt say that Murdoch could have done SST tests on American volunteers that would have revealed its suitability for an American audience.

It is said that a drawing is better than a thousand words. Martin Lindstrom would probably revise that saying: a brain scan is more illuminating than a thousand marketing questionnaires. Indeed, he predicts that more and more companies will be trading pencils for SST caps. Traditional market research will face increasing pressure from neuromarketing tools. Of course, there is still the affordability hurdle. After all, Lindstrom’s project required $7 million, or about $3,500 per scan. Ever the positive thinker, he predicts that as the tools become more popular, demand will make the tools cheaper, easier and more available. An SST helmet might be in your future.