I like Martin Lindstrom. He’s an out there kind of guy, which is clearly demonstrated in his newish book, Buy.ology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy. Maybe it’s because he shares my skepticism about traditional market research techniques, especially focus groups. Maybe because he understands how to build a good case for what is essentially scientific mind-reading. ( Lindstrom is a pioneer in the development of a technique that measures electrical activity in the brain in reaction to a stimulus, gathered through means of a sensory transmitter that looks like a swimming cap. It’s not what you SAY, he believes, but WHAT YOUR NEURONS DO that matters.
In brief, Lindstrom’s thesis is that when it comes to brands and marketing:
- Emotion is stronger than logic. Yup, proven time and again
- Consumers, consciously or un-consciously, mis-state their opinions in market research studies. Uh huh. 8 out of 10 new products fail. See my post on Tropicana.
- The way forward is to focus on what does or does not light up consumers’ prefrontal cortex. Hmmmm.
Although he fears that the reader might connect all this to an Orwellian world of mind control, my fertile brain went straight to Aldous Huxley, specifically Brave New World. Follow me on this one. In Brave New World, humans spend a lot of time blissed out on a legal substance known as soma. Lindstrom paves a logical and thought-provoking path to the importance of somatic markers. Somatic markers are “a…bookmark or shortcut in our brain [that] shepherd us toward a decision that we know will yield the best, least painful outcome.”
If you follow Lindstrom’s thesis, then branding and related marketing activities are about triggering the most “blissful” response (or at least not a negative one) in the mind of the consumer, thus leading to purchase and preference. I personally buy into this. How many of us, through endless focus groups or one on one interviews or blindness inducing quantitative data analysis, are trying to find the holy grail of the ultimate brand “delighter” or “preference driver”?
There is much, much more in buy.ology that I don’t have time or patience to cover in this post. Lindstrom can be a little grandiose, and in a few instances seemingly self-contradictory, but mostly he had me in general agreement with his concepts. And lest you think this neurology stuff is all theory, apparently Frito-Lay is a believer–they have developed an ad campaign and snack food repackaging based on validation from neurological testing.
I question, though, whether brain scans will become so very commonplace. It’s great if you are a mass marketer with the budget and patience to develop prototype ads as stimuli. It’s a lot harder at the brand strategy or product innovation level when you are dealing in abstract concepts or the unknown.
For someone like me, who is so lopsidedly right brained, it’s always sweet to see proof of the power of emotion and intuition over formula and algorithm. And until there is a real-world soma, then I’m happy to be blissed out by brands.
Right Brain Matters 