BUYOLOGY by Martin Lindström | impressum & highlights
Page Count: Paperback, 256
Genre: Business, Marketing, Neuromarketing
P2 - Point is, our brains are constantly busy collecting and filtering information. Some bits of information will make it into long-term storage,-in other words, memory- but most will become extraneous clutter, dispensed into oblivion. The process is unconscious and instantaneous, but it is going on every second of every minute of every day.
P3 - But if marketers could uncover what is going on in our brains that makes us choose one brand over another -what information passes through our brain!s filter and what information doesn’t- well that would be key to truly building brands of the future.
Neuromarketing is the key to unlocking what I call our Buyology- the subconscious thoughts, feelings, and desires that drive the purchasing decisions we make each and every day of our lives.
P5 - My belief? That by better understanding our own seemingly irrational behavior -whether it’s why we buy a designer shirt or how we assess a job candidate- we actually gain more control, not less. Because the more we know about why we fall prey to the tricks and tactics of advertisers, the better we can defend ourselves against them. And the more companies know about our subconscious needs and desires, the more useful, meaningful products they will bring to the market.
P18 - By 2003, it had become pretty clear to me that traditional research methods, like market research and focus groups, were no longer up to the task of finding out what consumers really think. And that’s because our irrational minds, flooded with cultural biases rooted in our tradition, upbringing, and a whole lot of other subconscious factors, assert a powerful but hidden influence over the choices we make.
P19 - But 85 percent of the time our brains are on autopilot. It’s not that we mean to lie -it’s just that our unconscious minds are a lot better at interpreting our behavior (including why we buy) than our conscious minds are.
P26 - All the positive associations the subjects had with Coca-Cola -its history, logo, color, design, and fragrance; their own childhood memories of Coke, Coke’s TV and print ads over the years, the sheer, inarguable, inexorable, ineluctable, emotional Coke-ness of the brand -beat back their rational, natural preference for the taste of Pepsi. Why? Because emotions are the way in which our brains encode things of value, and a brand that engages us emotionally -think Apple, Harley Davidson, and L’Oréal, just for starters- will win every single time.
P28 - That’s because, just like market research, economic modeling is based on the premise that people behave in a predictably rational way. But again, what’s beginning to show up in the fledgling world of brain scanning is the enormous influences our emotions have on every decision we make.
As George Loewenstein, a behavioral economist from Carneige Mellon University, confirmed: “Most of the brain is dominated by automatic processes, rather than deliberate thinking. A lot of what happens in the brain is emotional, not cognitive.”
P48 - Over the years, neuromarketing research has found that consumers’ memory of a product, whether it’s deodorant, perfume, or a brand of tequila, is the most relevant, reliable measure of an ad’s effectiveness. It’s also linked with subjects’ future buying behavior. In other words, if we remember Mitchum Roll-On, Calvin Klein’s Euphoria, and Don Julio Anejo tequila, we’ll be far more likely to reach for them the next time we’re in a store or add them to our cart the next time we’re shopping online. So it made sense to compare the strengths of subjects’ memories for the logos -both Branded and Unbranded- that they’d seen both before and after watching American Idol.
P60 - In both cases, their mirror neurons overrode their rational thinking and caused them to unconsciously imitate -and purchase- what was in front of them.
P63 - But mirror neurons don’t work alone. Often, they work in tandem with dopamine, one of the brains’s pleasure chemicals. Dopamine is one of the most addictive substances known to man -and purchasing decisions are driven in some part by its seductive effects.
P64 - Why? Because consciously or not, we calculate purchases based on how they might bring us social status -and status is linked with reproductive success.
P67 - So buyers beware. Because the future of advertising isn’t smoke and mirrors -it’s mirror neurons. And they will prove even more powerful in driving our loyalty, our minds, our wallets, and our Buyology than even the marketers themselves could have anticipated.
P70 - Generally speaking, subliminal messages are defined as visual, auditory, or any other sensory messages that register just below our level of conscious perception and can be detected only by the subconscious mind.
P83 - To no one’s surprise, the fMRI scans revealed a pronounced response in the volunteers’ nucleus accumbens -the area we now know to be involved with reward, craving, and addiction- when they viewed the actual cigarette packs. But what was more interesting was that when the smokers were exposed to the non explicit images -the red Ferrari, the cowboys on horseback, the camel in a desert- over a period of less than five seconds, there was an almost immediate activity in the cravings regions of their brains as well, in the exact same regions that responded to the explicit images of the packs and logos.
P84 - One reason is that since the subliminal images didn’t show any visible logos, the smokers weren’t consciously aware that they were viewing an advertising message, and as a result they let their guards down.
P89 - Rituals help us form emotional connections with brands and products. They make the things we buy memorable.
P99 - But what do rituals have to do with what we think about when we buy? A lot. For one thing, products and brands that have rituals or superstitions associated with them are much “stickier” than those that don’t. In an unsettled, fast-moving world, we’re all searching for stability and familiarity, and product rituals give us an illusion of comfort and belonging.
P105 - Less extreme cases of brand obsession typically take root in adolescence and even earlier. If children experience social difficulties in school, studies have shown they’re far more likely to become preoccupied with collecting. Collecting something -whether it’s coins, stamps, leaves, Pokemon cards, or Beanie Babies- gives children a sense of mastery, completion, and control, while at the same time raising their self-esteem, elevating their status, and just maybe even compensating for earlier years of social difficulty.
P119 - None of the customers had any idea what the X9 Factor was, but were indignant that Unilever had dared to get rid of it. In fact, many people claimed that their shampoo wasn’t working anymore, and that their hair had lost its luster, all because the company had dropped the elusive X9 Factor. It just goes to show that the more mystery and intrigue a brand can cultivate, the more likely it will appeal to us.
P124 - But it was Dr. Calvert’s next finding that was truly fascinating. She discovered that when people viewed images associated with the strong brands -the iPod, the Harley-Davidson, the Ferrari, and others- their brains registered the exact same patterns of activity as they did when they viewed the religious images.
P143 - But the truth of the matter is, visual images are far more effective, and more memorable, when they are coupled with another senses -like sound or smell. To fully engage us emotionally, companies are discovering, they’d be better off not just inundating us with logos, but pumping fragrances into our nostrils and music into our ears as well. It’s called Sensory Branding.
P145 - On the basis of our sight-and smell experiment, she concluded that odor activates many of the exact same regions as the sight of a product -even the sight of that product’s logo.
P147 - Of all our senses, smell is the most primal, the most deeply rooted. It’s how our ancestors developed a taste for food, sought out mates, and intuited the presence of enemies. When we smell something, the odor receptors in our noses make an unimpeded beeline to our limbic system, which controls our emotions, memories and sense of well-being.
P155 - In a study of phone directory advertising, researchers found that colored ads hold customers’ attention for two seconds or more, whereas black-and-white images hold our interest for less than one second -a crucial difference in the retail world, when you consider the fact that on average, most products have only one-twenties of a second to grab our attention before we move on.
P158- Sound can even determine whether we pick up a bottle of French Chardonnay over a German Riesling. Over a two-week period, two researchers at the University of Leicester played either accordion-heavy, recognizably French music or a German Bierkeller brass band over the speakers of the wine section inside a large supermarket. On French music days, 77 percent of consumers bought French wine, whereas on Bierkeller music days, the majority of consumers made a beeline for the German section of the store. In short, a customer was three to four times more likely to select a bottle of wine that they associated with the music playing overhead than one they didn’t. Were customers aware of what they were hearing? No doubt they were, peripherally. But only one out of the forty-four customers who agreed to answer a few questions at the checkout counter mentioned it among the reasons they bought the wine they did.
P185 - And when a recent Dolce & Gabbana print ad picturing what looked like a gang rape was pulled in response to protests by women in Spain, Italy, and the United States, the brand suffered. Still, while companies may drive customers away in the short term with such suggestive advertising, the fact remains that theses ads, offensive though they may be, are that much more memorable for their shock value.
P195 - Among the companies taking advantage of neuromarketing is Christian Dior, which put its new fragrance, J’adore, to the fMRI test, assessing everything from its scent into its colors to its ad placements. The company won’t say what it uncovered, but it’s worth noting that J’adore has been one of the most blazingly successful launches at Christian Dior in years.
P196 - Neuroscientists have even studied how our brains make decisions about how much we’re willing to pay for a product. When subjects view luxury products such as Louis Vuitton and Gucci being sold at full price, both the nucleus accumbens and the anterior cingulate light up, showing the pleasure of anticipatory reward mixed with the conflict about buying such an expensive doodad. But when consumers are shown the same products priced at a significant discount, the “conflict” signal decreases as the reward activation simultaneously goes up.
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