We all know sex sells… but is it that clear cut? In the book, Buyology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy, author Martin Lindstrom suggests that sex doesn’t sell. All that erotically charged imagery actually overwhelms the brain, which can’t recall the product.
How does he know? He spent $7 million using both MRI and EEG technologies to study what was really going on in the brains of consumers as they watched commercials and thought about brands.
It turns out what does work is sex with emotion, particularly sex with controversy. Think “Nothing comes between me and my Calvins,” ad circa 1980 where the public was up in arms… The most important thing in triggering a buy is to make a product memorable, which is what happens when a buyer experiences emotion connected with a product.
Martin Lindstrom pioneers the use of neuroscience to investigate consumer “Buyology” – the subconscious thoughts, feelings, and desires that drive purchasing decisions.
For this reason, product integration — product placement where the gizmo is integral to the plot of a TV show — is far more effective than conventional ads. For example, people tended to remember the Aston Martin brand in Daniel Craig’s first James Bond movie, Casino Royale, but not FedEx or Louis Vuitton whose placements weren’t central to the plot or even related to the on-screen action in any significant way.
Successful ads create fear about personal inadequacy (for which the product is the solution) but if you stimulate the part of the brain that registers general anxieties — such as fear of job loss — customers are put-off.
The Best Ads
The best ads offer wish-fulfilment — if you buy these jeans, you too will look like the pretty, happy models. But those models can’t be out of the consumer’s league. The trick is to create an idealized image of a consumer.
For example, Abercrombie and Fitch hired better-than-average looking teenagers to don the clothes and hangout, in packs, around their stores. They looked popular and attractive to the target market, but were well within what those teens could achieve themselves as long as they had the ‘rents credit card.
With their underdeveloped brains, teenagers particularly have the urge to mirror other teens, an impulse that appears to explain a lot of fads. It’s better known as monkey-see, monkey-do. Primates imitate those around them due, it turns out, to some observed actions stimulating certain satisfying parts of their little chimp brains.
Now marketers can wire up a focus group and see if the fad they’re selling hits those relevant grey cells. No more “throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks,” as Lindstrom puts it. Even in cases where we don’t consciously want a product, this research will give marketers a hammer for hitting the wallet-opening reflex.
What Neuroscience Reveals About Consumers, Brands, and Marketing
Based on the results of his studies, Lindstrom draws the following conclusions:
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* Cigarette warning labels actually encourage smoking.
* Product placement only works if the brand has a logical and integral function in the storyline.
* People purchase goods and services that they think will help them be more like the people they admire.
* Subliminal advertising works, and may be more powerful than a logo.
* Products enjoy greater brand loyalty if they are associated with a ritual or superstition.
* People react to strong brands in the same way that they react to religious icons.
* Advertisements that appeal to multiple senses are more effectual than those that rely on vision alone.
* Sex and beauty don’t always sell.
Read more: http://businessbooks.suite101.com/article.cfm/book_review_of_martin_lindstroms_buyology#ixzz0JBCTtsNY&C
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Marketers will find Buyology an excellent primer as well as an outstanding source for significant amounts of new data. In addition, this is new and not all of the data is in… so you will need to verify the results of your techniques to see what works.
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