WHAT IS NEUROMARKETING?

Buyology
By Martin Lindstrom
http://www.martinlindstrom.com
WHAT IS NEUROMARKETING?
The Research Behind Buyology
NeuroMarketing is where science and marketing meet. Buyology bears
witness to an historic meeting between neuroscientists and marketing
experts, a union that sheds new light on how we make decisions about
what we buy — everything from food, to cell phones, to cigarettes, to
political candidates — and why.
A research discipline that’s still in its infancy, NeuroMarketing uses
high–tech brain scanning techniques, such as fMRI and EEG, to
investigate brain activity. This neuro–imaging hardware enables us to
examine and analyze what really drives our behavior, our opinions, our
preference for Corona over Budweiser, iPods over Zunes, or
McDonald’s over Wendy’s.
Understanding ‘Our Buyology’
Until now, most marketing, advertising and branding strategies have
been built on qualitative and quantitative market research. The fact is,
roughly 90% of our consumer buying behavior is unconscious, and we
can’t actually explain our preferences, or likely buying decisions, with
any accuracy. So market surveys and customer questionnaires are of
dubious value. As brands pour millions of dollars into advertising that
may or may not hit the mark, we realize that the time has come for a
paradigm shift. Advertisers need to know what directs our buying
decisions. NeuroMarketing will help us make the transition towards
understanding the truth and lies about why we buy. It circumvents the
question and answer approach of conventional research. A non–verbal
research method, NeuroMarketing bypasses a subject’s claims by
going straight to the source and examining the consumer’s brain
responses.
Today, we still know so little about the brain. But, in years to come, as
we learn more and more about the brain and its functions, we will be
able to decipher even more from observable brain activity. We will
have an ever–expanding framework within which to interpret data. You
could compare what we know of the brain today to what Christopher
Columbus understood of the globe in the 15th century. His charts
represented a great leap forward in civilization’s knowledge of the
world but, with hindsight, we can see how much more there was yet to
discover. Our current knowledge of the brain is similarly primitive.
NeuroMarketing, the marriage between neuroscience and marketing, is
opening windows on our consumer lives and revealing, for the first
time, our ‘buyology’.
Like all emerging fields, NeuroMarketing is practised by real experts
and by others who claim to have expertise they don’t. And, like all
research, the accuracy of NeuroMarketing results depends on good
planning and thoroughly considered processes in order to elicit
meaningful data from, in this case, observed brain activity.
In 2004 a number of studies were published about the methodology
and these helped to raise debate about the ethics of NeuroMarketing
research. A Coke–Pepsi study, published in Forbes magazine,
particularly prompted discussion. Buyology should further the debate
about both the ethical application of NeuroMarketing and its competent
practice. If you want to examine some of the ethical concerns about
the technique, a good place to start is www.commercialalert.org.
Commercial Alert plays a valuable role in monitoring commercialism
and challenging commercial practices which impinge on, or effect in
any way, the community, family and democratic values of the broad
community.
Scroll down to read the first chapter of the book
Buyology by Martin Lindstrom
1
a rush of blood
to the head
The Largest Neuromarketing
Study Ever Conducted
not surprisingly, the
smokers were on edge, fidgety, not sure what to expect.
Barely noticing the rain and overcast skies, they clumped
together outside the medical building in London, England,
that houses the Centre for NeuroImaging Sciences. Some
were self- described social smokers—a cigarette in the morning,
a second snuck in during lunch hour, maybe half-a- dozen
more if they went out carousing with their friends at night.
Others confessed to being longtime two-pack-a-day addicts.
All of them pledged their allegiance to a single brand, whether
it was Marlboros or Camels. Under the rules of the study, they
knew they wouldn’t be allowed to smoke for the next four
hours, so they were busy stockpiling as much tar and nicotine
inside their systems as they could. In between drags, they
swapped lighters, matches, smoke rings, apprehensions: Will
this hurt? George Orwell would love this. Do you think the machine will
be able to read my mind?
Inside the building, the setting was, as befits a medical lab-
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oratory, antiseptic, no- nonsense, and soothingly soulless—all
cool white corridors and flannel gray doors. As the study got
under way I took a perch behind a wide glass window inside a
cockpit-like control booth among a cluster of desks, digital
equipment, three enormous computers, and a bunch of
white-smocked researchers. I was looking over a room dominated
by an fMRI (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging)
scanner, an enormous, $4 million machine that looks like a giant
sculpted doughnut, albeit one with a very long, very hard
tongue. As the most advanced brain- scanning technique available
today, fMRI measures the magnetic properties of hemoglobin,
the components in red blood cells that carry oxygen
around the body. In other words, fMRI measures the amount
of oxygenated blood throughout the brain and can pinpoint
an area as small as one millimeter (that’s 0.03937 of an inch).
You see, when a brain is operating on a specific task, it demands
more fuel—mainly oxygen and glucose. So the harder
a region of the brain is working, the greater its fuel consumption,
and the greater the flow of oxygenated blood will be to
that site. So during fMRI, when a portion of the brain is in
use, that region will light up like a red-hot flare. By tracking
this activation, neuroscientists can determine what specific areas
in the brain are working at any given time.
Neuroscientists traditionally use this 32-ton, SUV-sized instrument
to diagnose tumors, strokes, joint injuries, and other
medical conditions that frustrate the abilities of X-rays and
CT scans. Neuropsychiatrists have found fMRI useful in shedding
light on certain hard-to-treat psychiatric conditions, including
psychosis, sociopathy, and bipolar illness. But those
smokers puffing and chatting and pacing in the waiting room
weren’t ill or in any kind of distress. Along with a similar sam-
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ple of smokers in the United States, they were carefully chosen
participants in a groundbreaking neuromarketing study
who were helping me get to the bottom—or the brain—of a
mystery that had been confounding health professionals, cigarette
companies, and smokers and nonsmokers alike for
decades.
For a long time, I’d noticed how the prominently placed
health warnings on cigarette boxes seemed to have bizarrely
little, if any, effect on smokers. Smoking causes fatal lung cancer.
Smoking causes emphysema. Smoking while pregnant causes birth defects.
Fairly straightforward stuff. Hard to argue with. And those are
just the soft- pedaled American warnings. European cigarette
makers place their warnings in coal-black, Magic Marker–thick
frames, making them even harder to miss. In Portugal, dwarfing
the dromedary on Camel packs, are words even a kid could
understand: Fumar Mata. Smoking kills. But nothing comes
even close to the cigarette warnings from Canada, Thailand,
Australia, Brazil—and soon the U.K. They’re gorily, forensically
true-to-life, showing full- color images of lung tumors,
gangrenous feet and toes, and the open sores and disintegrating
teeth that accompany mouth and throat cancers.
You’d think these graphic images would stop most smokers
in their tracks. So why, in 2006, despite worldwide tobacco
advertising bans, outspoken and frequent health warnings
from the medical community, and massive government investment
in antismoking campaigns, did global consumers
continue to smoke a whopping 5,763 billion cigarettes, a figure
which doesn’t include duty-free cigarettes, or the huge international
black market trade? (I was once in an Australian
convenience store where I overheard the clerk asking a
smoker, “Do you want the pack with the picture of the lungs,
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the heart, or the feet?” How often did this happen, I asked the
clerk? Fifty percent of the time that customers asked for cigarettes,
he told me.) Despite what is now known about smoking,
it’s estimated that about one-third of adult males across
the globe continue to light up. Approximately 15 billion cigarettes
are sold every day—that’s 10 million cigarettes sold a
minute. In China, where untold millions of smokers believe
that cigarettes can cure Parkinson’s disease, relieve symptoms
of schizophrenia, boost the efficacy of brain cells, and improve
their performance at work, over 300 million people,1
including 60 percent of all male doctors, smoke. With annual
sales of 1.8 trillion cigarettes, the Chinese monopoly is responsible
for roughly one-third of all cigarettes being smoked
on earth today2—a large percentage of the 1.4 billion people
using tobacco, which, according to World Bank projections, is
expected to increase to roughly 1.6 billion by 2025 (though
China consumes more cigarettes than the United States, Russia,
Japan, and Indonesia combined).
In the Western world, nicotine addiction still ranks as an
enormous concern. Smoking is the biggest killer in Spain
today, with fifty thousand smoking- related deaths annually.
In the U.K., roughly one-third of all adults under the age of
sixty-five light up, while approximately 42 percent of people
under sixty-five are exposed to tobacco smoke at home.3
Twelve times more British people have died from smoking
than died in World War II. According to the American Lung
Association, smoking- related diseases affect roughly 438,000
American lives a year, “including those affected indirectly,
such as babies born prematurely due to prenatal maternal
smoking and victims of ‘secondhand’ exposure to tobacco’s
carcinogens.” The health-care costs in the United States
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alone? Over $167 billion a year.4 And yet cigarette companies
keep coming up with innovative ways to kill us. For example,
Philip Morris’s latest weapon against workplace smoking bans
is Marlboro Intense, a smaller, high-tar cigarette—seven puffs
worth—that can be consumed in stolen moments in between
meetings, phone calls, and PowerPoint presentations.5
It makes no sense. Are smokers selectively blind to warning
labels? Do they think, to a man or a woman, Yes, but I’m the
exception here? Are they showing the world some giant act of
bravado? Do they secretly believe they are immortal? Or do
they know the health dangers and just not care?
That’s what I was hoping to use fMRI technology to find
out. The thirty-two smokers in today’s study? They were
among the 2,081 volunteers from America, England, Germany,
Japan, and the Republic of China that I’d enlisted for
the largest, most revolutionary neuromarketing experiment in
history.
It was twenty-five times larger than any neuromarketing
study ever before attempted. Using the most cutting-edge scientific
tools available, it revealed the hidden truths behind
how branding and marketing messages work on the human
brain, how our truest selves react to stimuli at a level far
deeper than conscious thought, and how our unconscious
minds control our behavior (usually the opposite of how we
think we behave). In other words, I’d set off on a quest to investigate
some of the biggest puzzles and issues facing consumers,
businesses, advertisers, and governments today.
For example, does product placement really work? (The
answer, I found out, is a qualified no.) How powerful are
brand logos? (Fragrance and sound are more potent than any
logo alone.) Does subliminal advertising still take place? (Yes,
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and it probably influenced what you picked up at the conve -
nience store the other day.) Is our buying behavior affected by
the world’s major religions? (You bet, and increasingly so.)
What effect do disclaimers and health warnings have on us?
(Read on.) Does sex in advertising work (not really) and how
could it possibly get more explicit than it is now? (You just
watch.)
Beginning in 2004, from start to finish, our study took up
nearly three years of my life, cost approximately $7 million
(provided by eight multinational companies), comprised multiple
experiments, and involved thousands of subjects from
across the globe, as well as two hundred researchers, ten
professors and doctors, and an ethics committee. And it employed
two of the most sophisticated brain- scanning instruments
in the world: the fMRI and an advanced version of the
electroencephalograph known as the SST, short for steadystate
typography, which tracks rapid brain waves in real time.
The research team was overseen by Dr. Gemma Calvert, who
holds the Chair in Applied Neuroimaging at the University of
Warwick, En gland, and is the founder of Neurosense in Oxford,
and Professor Richard Silberstein, the CEO of Neuro-
Insight in Australia. And the results? Well, all I’ll say for now
is that they’ll transform the way you think about how and why
you buy.
marlene, one of the smokers in the study, took her place
lying flat on her back inside the fMRI. The machine made a little
ticking sound as the platform rose and locked into place.
Marlene looked a little hesitant—who wouldn’t?—but man-
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aged a gung-ho smile as a technician placed the protective
head coil over most of her face in preparation for the first
brain scan of the day.
From Marlene’s pretesting questionnaire and interview, I
knew she was a recently divorced mother of two from Middlesex,
and that she’d started smoking at boarding school fifteen
years earlier. She thought of herself less as a nicotine
addict than a “party smoker,” that is, she smoked just a couple
of “small” cigarettes during the day, as well as eight to ten
more at night.
“Are you affected by the warnings on cigarette packs?” the
questionnaire had asked.
“Yes,” Marlene had written, twirling her pen around in her
fingers as though she was about to ignite the thing.
“Are you smoking less as a consequence of these?”
Another yes. More pen- spinning. I’ve never been a smoker,
but I felt for her.
Her interview answers were clear enough, but now it was
time to interview her brain. For those who’ve never had an
MRI, it’s not what I’d call the most relaxing or enjoyable experience
in the world. The machine is clankingly noisy, lying
perfectly still is tedious, and if you’re at all prone to panic or
claustrophobia, it can feel as if you’re being buried alive in a
phone booth. Once inside, it’s best you remain in a state of
yogic calm. Breathe. In, out, in again. You’re free to blink and
swallow, but you better ignore that itch on your left calf if it
kills you. A tic, a jiggle, a fidget, a grimace, body twitching—
the slightest movement at all and the results can be compromised.
Wedding bands, bracelets, necklaces, nose rings, or
tongue studs have to be taken off beforehand, as well. Thanks
to the machine’s rapacious magnet, any scrap of metal would
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rip off so fast you wouldn’t know what just belted you in the
eye.
Marlene was in the scanner for a little over an hour. A small
reflective apparatus resembling a car’s rearview mirror projected
a series of cigarette warning labels from various angles,
one after another, on a nearby screen. Asked to rate her desire
to smoke during this slideshow, Marlene signaled her responses
by pressing down on what’s known as a button box—
a small black console resembling a hand-sized accordion—as
each image flashed by.
We continued to perform brain scans on new subjects over
the next month and a half.
Five weeks later, the team leader, Dr. Calvert, presented me
with the results. I was, to put it mildly, startled. Even Dr.
Calvert was taken aback by the findings: warning labels on the
sides, fronts, and backs of cigarette packs had no effect on
suppressing the smokers’ cravings at all. Zero. In other words,
all those gruesome photographs, government regulations, billions
of dollars some 123 countries had invested in nonsmoking
campaigns, all amounted, at the end of a day, to, well, a big
waste of money.
“Are you sure?” I kept saying.
“Pretty damn certain,” she replied, adding that the statistical
validity was as solid as could be.
But this wasn’t half as amazing as what Dr. Calvert discovered
once she analyzed the results further. Cigarette warnings—
whether they informed smokers they were at risk of
contracting emphysema, heart disease, or a host of other
chronic conditions—had in fact stimulated an area of the
smokers’ brains called the nucleus accumbens, otherwise
known as “the craving spot.” This region is a chain-link of
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specialized neurons that lights up when the body desires
something—whether it’s alcohol, drugs, tobacco, sex, or gambling.
When stimulated, the nucleus accumbens requires
higher and higher doses to get its fix.
In short, the fMRI results showed that cigarette warning labels
not only failed to deter smoking, but by activating the nucleus
accumbens, it appeared they actually encouraged smokers
to light up. We couldn’t help but conclude that those same cigarette
warning labels intended to curb smoking, reduce cancer,
and save lives had instead become a killer marketing tool for
the tobacco industry.
Most of the smokers checked off yes when they were
asked if warning labels worked—maybe because they thought
it was the right answer, or what the researchers wanted to hear,
or maybe because they felt guilty about what they knew smoking
was doing to their health. But as Dr. Calvert concluded
later, it wasn’t that our volunteers felt ashamed about what
smoking was doing to their bodies; they felt guilty that the labels
stimulated their brains’ craving areas. It was just that their
conscious minds couldn’t tell the difference. Marlene hadn’t
been lying when she filled out her questionnaire. But her
brain—the ultimate no- bullshit zone—had adamantly contradicted
her. Just as our brains do to each one of us every single
day.
The results of the additional brain scan studies I carried
out were just as provocative, fascinating, and controversial as
the cigarette research project. One by one, they brought me
closer to a goal I’d set out to accomplish: to overturn some of
the most long-held assumptions, myths, and beliefs about
what kinds of advertising, branding, and packaging actually
work to arouse our interest and encourage us to buy. If I could
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help uncover the subconscious forces that stimulate our interest
and ultimately cause us to open our wallets, the brain-scan
study would be the most important three years of my life.
by way of profession, I’m a global branding expert. That is,
it’s been a lifelong mission (and passion) to figure out how
consumers think, why they buy or don’t buy the products they
do—and what marketers and advertisers can do to pump new
life into products that are sick, stuck, stumbling, or just lousy
to begin with.
If you look around, chances are pretty good you’ll find my
branding fingerprints are all over your house or apartment,
from those products under the kitchen sink, to the chocolate
you stash in your desk drawer, to the phone beside your bed,
to the shaving cream in your bathroom, to the car sitting in the
driveway. Maybe I helped brand your TV’s remote control.
The coffee you gulped down this morning. The bacon cheeseburger
and French fries you ordered in last week. Your computer
software. Your espresso machine. Your toothpaste. Your
dandruff shampoo. Your lip balm. Your underwear. Over the
years I’ve been doing this work, I’ve helped brand antiperspirant,
feminine hygiene products, iPod speakers, beer, motorcycles,
perfume, Saudi Arabian eggs—the list goes on and on.
As a branding expert and brand futurist (meaning that the sum
of my globe- hopping experience gives me a helicopter view
of probable future consumer and advertising trends), businesses
consider my colleagues and me something of a brand
ambulance service, a crisis- intervention management team.
Let’s say that your line of pricey bottled water from the
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Silica-Filled- Crystal-Clear- Mountain-Streams-and- Artesian-
Wells-of- Wherever is tanking. The company wants consumers
to believe it’s bottled by elves standing ankle-deep in fjords
rather than inside a sprawling plant off the New Jersey Turnpike,
but regardless, its market shares are tumbling, and no
one in the company knows what to do. I’ll begin digging.
What’s the secret of their product? What makes it stand out?
Are there any stories or rituals or mysteries consumers associate
with it? If not, can we root around and find some? Can the
product somehow break through the two- dimensional barrier
of advertising by appealing to senses the company hasn’t yet
thought of ? Smell, touch, sound? A gasp the cap makes when
you unscrew it? A flirty pink straw? Is the advertising campaign
edgy and funny and risk- taking, or is it as boring and
forgettable as every other company’s?
Because I travel so much, I’m able to see how brands perform
all over the world. I’m on an airplane about three hundred
days out of the year, giving presentations, analyses, and
speeches. If it’s Tuesday, I could be in Mumbai. The next day
São Paolo. Or Dublin, Tokyo, Edinburgh, San Francisco,
Athens, Lima, Sri Lanka, or Shanghai. But my hectic travel
schedule is an advantage I can bring to a team that’s usually
too busy to go outside their own building for lunch, much less
visit a store in Rio de Janeiro or Amsterdam or Buenos Aires
to observe their product in action.
I’ve been told more times than I can count that my appearance
is as nonconventional as what I do for a living. At
thirty-eight, I stand about five feet eight inches, and am
blessed, or cursed, with an extremely young, boyish- looking
face. The excuse I’ve come up with over the years is that I
grew up in Denmark, where it was so cold all the time the
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weather froze my looks in place. My features, my raked-back
blond hair, and my habit of wearing all black give a lot of people
the impression that I’m some kind of quirky child evangelist,
or maybe some precocious, slightly wired high-school
student who got lost on the way to the science lab and ended
up in a corporate boardroom by mistake. I’ve gotten used to
this over the years. I suppose you could say that it’s evolved
into my brand.
So how did I find myself staring through a window into an
antiseptic medical lab in a rain-soaked English university as
one volunteer after another submitted to an fMRI brain scan?
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. Like Marlene and all
those other smokers who said that cigarette warnings discouraged
them from smoking, we may think we know why we do
the things we do—but a much closer look into the brain tells
us otherwise.
Think about it. As human beings, we enjoy thinking of
ourselves as a rational species. We feed and clothe ourselves.
We go to work. We remember to turn down the thermostat
at night. We download music. We go to the gym. We handle
crises—missed deadlines, a child falling off a bike, a friend
getting sick, a parent dying, etc.—in a grown-up, evenhanded
way. At the least, that’s our goal. If a partner or colleague accuses
us of acting irrationally, we get a little offended. They
might as well have just accused us of temporary insanity.
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But like it or not, all of us consistently engage in behavior
for which we have no logical or clear-cut explanation. This is
truer than ever before in our stressed-out, technologically
overwired world, where news of terrorist threats, political
saber- rattling, fires, earthquakes, floods, violence, and assorted
other disasters pelts us from the moment we turn on the
morning news to the time we go to bed. The more stress we’re
under, the more frightened and insecure and uncertain we
feel—and the more irrationally we tend to behave.
For example, consider how much superstition governs our
lives. We knock on wood for luck. (I’ve been in boardrooms
where, if there’s no wood around, executives will glance
around helplessly for a substitute. Does a briefcase count? A
pencil? What about the floor?) We won’t walk under ladders.
We cross our fingers for luck. We’d prefer not to fly on Friday
the thirteenth, or drive down the street where we spotted that
black cat in the bushes last week. If we break a mirror, we
think, That’s it, seven years of bad luck. Of course, if you ask us,
most of us will say no, don’t be ridiculous, I give absolutely no
credence to any of those inane superstitions. Yet most of us
continue to act on them, every day of our lives.
Under stress (or even when life is going along pretty well),
people tend to say one thing while their behavior suggests
something entirely different. Needless to say, this spells disaster
for the field of market research, which relies on consumers
being accurate and honest. 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.
The concept of brand- building has been around for close
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to a century. But advertisers still don’t know much more than
department store pioneer John Wanamaker did a century ago
when he famously declared, “Half my advertising budget is
wasted. Trouble is, I don’t know which half.” Companies often
don’t know what to do to engage us authentically—as opposed
to simply attracting our attention. I’m not saying
companies aren’t smart, because they are. Some, like the tobacco
companies, are scarily smart. But most still can’t answer
a basic question: What drives us, as consumers, to make the
choices we do? What causes us to choose one brand or product
over another? What are shoppers really thinking? And
since no one can come up with a decent answer to these questions,
companies plow ahead using the same strategies and
techniques as they always have. Marketers, for example, are
still doing the same old stuff: quantitative research, which involves
surveying lots and lots of volunteers about an idea, a
concept, a product, or even a kind of packaging—followed by
qualitative research, which turns a more intense spotlight on
smaller focus groups handpicked from the same population.
In 2005, corporations spent more than $7.3 billion on market
research in the United States alone. In 2007, that figure rose to
$12 billion. And that doesn’t even include the additional expenses
involved in marketing an actual product—the packaging
and displays, TV commercials, online banner ads, celebrity
endorsements, and billboards—which carry a $117 billion annual
price tag in America alone.
But if those strategies still work, then why do eight out of
ten new product launches fail within the first three months?
(In Japan, product launches fail a miserable 9.7 times out of
every ten.) What we know now, and what you’ll read about in
the pages that follow, is that what people say on surveys and
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in focus groups does not reliably affect how they behave—far
from it. Let’s take an example. Today’s modern mother is more
and more fearful about “germs,” “safety,” and “health.” No
woman in her right mind wants to accidentally ingest E. coli,
or pick up strep throat, nor does she want little Ethan or Sophie
to get infected either. So a company’s research department
develops a small vial of something antibacterial—we’ll
call it “Pure-Al”—that women can tuck in their pockets, and
whip out to slather on their hands after a day spent in a suffocating
office, a friend’s filthy apartment or an overcrowded
subway car.
But can Pure-Al really inhibit our fears about “germs” and
“safety”? How can its marketers know what these terms mean
to most of us? Sure, there’s a basic human desire to feel safe
and secure, as well as a natural aversion to germ- ridden banisters,
bacteria- laden jungle gyms, and dusty offices. But as our
smokers’ questionnaires showed, we don’t always express or
act on these feelings consciously; there’s an entire peninsula
of thought and feeling that remains out of reach. The same
goes for every single other emotion we experience, whether
it’s love, empathy, jealousy, anger, revulsion, and so on.
Tiny, barely perceptible factors can slant focus group responses.
Maybe one woman felt that as a mother of four kids
and three dogs and seventeen geckos, she should care more
about germs, but didn’t want to admit to the other women
in the room that her house was already messy beyond the
pale. Or maybe the head of the research team reminded another
woman of an ex- boyfriend who left her for her best
friend and this (okay, just maybe) tainted her impression of
the product.
Maybe they just all hated his nose.
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Point is, try putting these micro- emotions into words or
writing them down in a roomful of strangers. It can’t be done.
That’s why the true reactions and emotions we as consumers
experience are more likely to be found in the brain, in the
nanosecond lapse before thinking is translated into words. So,
if marketers want the naked truth—the truth, unplugged and
uncensored, about what causes us to buy—they have to interview
our brains.
All of this is why, in 2003, I became convinced that something
was fundamentally wrong with the ways companies
reached out to customers, to us. Quite simply, companies
didn’t seem to understand consumers. Companies couldn’t
find and develop brands that matched our needs. Nor were
they sure how to communicate in a way so that their products
gripped our minds and hearts. Whether they were marketing
cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, fast-food, cars, or pickles, no advertisers
dared to stand out, or to try out anything remotely
new or revolutionary. In terms of understanding the mind of
the average consumer they were like Christopher Columbus in
1492, gripping a torn, hand-drawn map as the wind picked up
and his boat lurched and listed toward what might or might
not be flat land.
By uncovering the brain’s deepest secrets, I wasn’t interested
in helping companies manipulate consumers—far from
it. I buy a lot of stuff, too, after all, and at the end of the day,
I’m as susceptible to products and brands as anyone. I also
want to sleep well at night, knowing I’ve done the right thing
(over the years I’ve turned down projects that, in my opinion,
crossed that line). By attempting to shine a spotlight on the
buying behavior of over two thousand study subjects, I felt I
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could help uncover our minds’ truest motivations—and just
maybe push human brain science forward at the same time.
It was time to throw everything up in the air, see where it
landed, then start all over again. Which is where our brainscanning
study came in.
for me, it all began with a Forbes magazine cover story, “In
Search of the Buy Button,” which I picked up during a typical
daylong airplane flight. The article chronicled the goings-on in
a small lab in Greenwich, England, where a market researcher
had joined forces with a cognitive neuroscientist to peer inside
the brains of eight young women as they watched a TV show
interspersed with half-a- dozen or so commercials for products
ranging from Kit Kat chocolates, to Smirnoff vodka, to
Volkswagen’s Passat.
Using a technique known as SST, which measures electrical
activity inside the brain (and resembles, I later found out, a
floppy black Roaring Twenties–era bathing cap), the scientist
and researcher had focused on a sequence of wiry lines crawling
across a computer, like two garter snakes engaged in a
mating dance. Only these weren’t snakes, but brain waves,
which SST was measuring millisecond-by- millisecond, in real
time, as the volunteers viewed the commercials. An abrupt
spike in one woman’s left prefrontal cortex might indicate to
researchers that she found Kit Kats appealing or appetizing. A
sharp drop later on, and the neurologist might infer the last
thing in the world she wanted was a Smirnoff-on-the-rocks.6
Brain waves as calibrated by SST are straight shooters.
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They don’t waver, hold back, equivocate, cave in to peer pressure,
conceal their vanity, or say what they think the person
across the table wants to hear. No: like fMRI, SST was the final
word on the human mind. You couldn’t get any more
cutting-edge than this. In other words, neuroimaging could
uncover truths that a half- century of market research, focus
groups, and opinion polling couldn’t come close to accomplishing.
I was so excited by what I was reading I nearly rang the call
button just so I could tell the steward.
As I mentioned earlier, eight out of every ten products
launched in the United States are destined to fail. In 2005,
more than 156,000 new products debuted in stores globally,
the equivalent of one new product release every three
minutes.7 Globally, according to the IXP Marketing Group,
roughly 21,000 new brands are introduced worldwide per year,
yet history tells us that all but a few of them have vanished
from the shelf a year later.8 In consumer products alone, 52
percent of all new brands, and 75 percent of individual products,
fail.9 Pretty terrible numbers. Neuroimaging, I realized,
could zero in on those with the highest chance of succeeding
by pinpointing consumers’ reward centers and revealing which
marketing or advertising efforts were most stimulating, appealing,
or memorable, and which ones were dull, off- putting,
anxiety- provoking, or worst of all, forgettable.
Market research wasn’t going away, but it was about to take
a seat at the neuroscience table and in the process, take on a
brainy new look.
* * *
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in 1975, watergate was still scandalizing America. Margaret
Thatcher was elected the leader of the conservative
party in Great Britain. Color TV debuted in Australia. Bruce
Springsteen came out with Born to Run. And executives at the
Pepsi-Cola Company decided to roll out a heavily publicized
experiment known as the Pepsi Challenge. It was very simple.
Hundreds of Pepsi reps set up tables in malls and supermarkets
all over the world, handing out two unmarked cups to
every man, woman, and child who’d stopped to see what all
the commotion was about. One cup contained Pepsi, the
other Coke. The subjects were asked which one they preferred.
If the results worked out as they hoped, Pepsi might finally
make a dent in Coke’s longtime domination of the
estimated $68 billion U.S. soft drink industry.
When the company’s marketing department finally toted
up the results, Pepsi executives were pleased, if slightly perplexed.
More than half of the volunteers claimed to prefer the
taste of Pepsi over Coke. Hallelujah, right? So by all accounts,
Pepsi should be trouncing Coke all across the world. But it
wasn’t. It made no sense.
In his 2005 best- seller, Blink, Malcolm Gladwell offers a
partial interpretation. The Pepsi Challenge was a “Sip Test,” or
what’s known in the soda industry as a “Central Location
Test,” or CLT. He cites a former Pepsi new- product development
executive, Carol Dollard, who explains the difference between
taking a sip of a soft drink out of a cup and downing the
entire can. In a sip test, people tend to like the sweeter product—
in this case Pepsi—but when they drink an entire can of
the stuff, there always lurks the possibility of blood sugar–
overkill. That, according to Gladwell, is why Pepsi prevailed in
the taste test, but Coke continued to lead the market.10
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But in 2003, Dr. Read Montague, the director of the Human
Neuroimaging Lab at Baylor College of Medicine in
Houston, decided to probe the test results more deeply.
Twenty-eight years after the original Pepsi Challenge, he revised
the study, this time using fMRI to measure the brains of
his sixty- seven study subjects. First, he asked the volunteers
whether they preferred Coke, Pepsi, or had no preference
whatsoever. The results matched the findings of the original
experiment almost exactly; more than half of the test subjects
reported a marked preference for Pepsi. Their brains did, too.
While taking a sip of Pepsi, this entirely new set of volunteers
registered a flurry of activity in the ventral putamen, a region
of the brain that’s stimulated when we find tastes appealing.
Interesting, but not all that dramatic—until a fascinating
finding showed up in the second stage of the experiment.
This time around, Dr. Montague decided to let the test
subjects know whether they were sampling Pepsi or Coke before
they tasted it. The result: 75 percent of the respondents
claimed to prefer Coke. What’s more, Montague also observed
a change in the location of their brain activity. In addition to
the ventral putamen, blood flows were now registering in the
medial prefrontal cortex, a portion of the brain responsible,
among other duties, for higher thinking and discernment. All
this indicated to Dr. Montague that two areas in the brain were
engaged in a mute tug-of-war between rational and emotional
thinking. And during that mini- second of grappling and indecision,
the emotions rose up like mutinous soldiers to override
respondents’ rational preference for Pepsi. And that’s the moment
Coke won.11
All the positive associations the subjects had with Coca-
Cola—its history, logo, color, design, and fragrance; their own
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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.
That Dr. Montague’s study had proven a conclusive scientific
link between branding and the brain took the scientific
community by surprise . . . and you can bet advertisers began
paying attention, too. A newborn but intriguing window into
our thought patterns and decision- making processes was a
few sips closer to becoming reality.
A similar, but no less powerful neuromarketing experiment
soon followed on the heels of the Coke–Pepsi study. Far
north from Texas, four Princeton University psychologists
were busy conducting another experiment, this one aimed at
scanning subjects’ brains as they were presented with a choice:
short-term immediate gratification versus delayed rewards.
The psychologists asked a group of random students to
choose between a pair of Amazon .com gift vouchers. If they
picked the first, a $15 gift voucher, they would get it at once.
If they were willing to wait two weeks for the $20 gift certificate,
well, obviously they’d be getting more bang for their
buck. The brain scans revealed that both gift options triggered
activity in the lateral prefrontal cortex, the area of the brain
that generates emotion. But the possibility of getting that $15
gift certificate now! caused an unusual flurry of stimulation in
the limbic areas of most students’ brains—a whole grouping
of brain structures that’s primarily responsible for our emob
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tional life, as well as for the formation of memory. The more
the students were emotionally excited about something, the
psychologists found, the greater the chances of their opting
for the immediate, if less immediately gratifying, alternative.
Of course, their rational minds knew the $20 was logically a
better deal, but—guess what—their emotions won out.12
Economists, too, want to understand the underlying decisions
involved in what makes us behave as we do. Economic
theory may be fairly sophisticated, but it’s come up against
blocks similar to the ones advertising is confronting. “Finance
and economic research has hit the wall,” explains Andrew Lo,
who runs AlphaSimplex Group, a Cambridge, Massachusetts,
hedge fund firm. “We need to get inside the brain to understand
why people make decisions.”13
That’s because, just like market research, economic modeling
is based on the premise that people behave in a pre dict -
ably 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. Thus the interest
in neuro- economics, the study of the way the brain makes
financial decisions. Thanks to fMRI, it is giving unprecedented
insight into how emotions—such as generosity, greed, fear,
and well- being—impact economic decision- making.
As George Loewenstein, a behavioral economist from
Carnegie 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.”14
* * *
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it comes as no surprise that once neuroimaging had
snagged the attention of the advertising world, it would find
its way into other disciplines, too. In fact, politics, law enforcement,
economics, and even Hollywood were already in
on the action.
Politicians’ interest in the fMRI—well, you could almost see
it coming. Committees spend up to a billion dollars handcrafting
an electable presidential candidate—and elections are increasingly
won and lost by the tiniest fraction of a percentage
point. Imagine having at your disposal a tool that could possibly
pinpoint what goes on in the brains of registered voters. If
you were involved in a campaign, you’d want to use it, right? Or
so Tom Freedman, a strategist and senior advisor to the Clinton
administration, must have thought when he founded a
company known as FKF Applied Research. FKF is devoted to
studying decision- making processes, and how the brain responds
to leadership qualities. In 2003, his company used fMRI
scanning to analyze public responses to campaign commercials
during the run-up to the Bush- Kerry presidential campaign.
Freedman’s test subjects looked at a selection of commercials
for incumbent president George W. Bush and Massachusetts
senator John Kerry; photographs of each candidate;
images of the September 11 World Trade Center terrorist attacks;
and former president Lyndon Johnson’s infamous 1964
“Daisy” ad in which a young girl is seen frolicking with a daisy
as a nuclear explosion detonates.
The results? Not surprisingly, the September 11 attack imagery
and the “Daisy” ad triggered a noticeable, across-theboard
increase in activity in voters’ amygdalas, a small brain
region named after the Greek word for “almond,” which
governs, among other things, fear, anxiety, and dread. Yet
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Freedman found that Republicans and Democrats reacted differently
to ads replaying the September 11 attacks; the amygdalas
of Democrats lit up far more noticeably than the
amygdalas of Republicans. Marco Iacobini, the lead researcher
and an associate professor at the Neuropsychiatric Institute,
interpreted this odd discrepancy to Democrats’ fear that 9/11
was a nerve- wracking touch-point that could lead to George
W. Bush’s reelection in 2004. Tom Freedman threw in the theory
that in general, Democrats are a lot more unsettled by the
idea of military force, which they associated with 9/11, than
are most Republicans.
But what was most interesting to Freedman was that his
study also showed that scanning voters’ amygdalas could be
beneficial in designing campaign ads, as playing on voters’ fear
has been shown time and time again to be key in securing a
politician’s win. After all, Johnson’s “Daisy” ad had helped to
ensure his victory in 1964 by playing to the fear of nuclear
war. And, as it turned out, history would repeat itself forty
years later when the Republicans clinched victory in the 2004
election by sledgehammering the fear of terrorism into voters’
heads. Despite widespread cries that political advertising emphasize
“optimism,” “hope,” “building up, not tearing down,”
and so on, fear works. It’s what our brains remember.
Although using brain- scanning technology to sway political
decisions is in its infancy, I predict that the 2008 American
presidential showdown will be the last-ever election to be governed
by traditional surveys, and that by 2012, neuroscience
will begin to dominate all election predictions. “These new
tools could help us someday be less reliant on clichés and unproven
adages. They’ll help put a bit more science in political
science,” Tom Freedman commented.15
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Hollywood, too, is fascinated by neuroscience. A Stanford
University experimental neurobiologist, Steve Quartz, has
studied subjects’ brains to see how they respond to trailers of
movies that are weeks, if not months, away from general release.
Are they memorable, catchy, provocative? Will they
hook our attention? By exploring precisely what appeals to the
brain’s reward center, studios can create the most provocative
trailers, or even sculpt the end of the movie to reflect what appeals
to us, the viewing public.16 So if you think films are formulaic
now, fasten your seatbelts for Rocky 52.
As for law enforcement? One California entrepreneur has
come up with a neuroimaging spin on the widely used polygraph,
or lie- detector, test with a product called the No Lie
MRI. Its assumption, as any capable dissembler can tell you, is
that it takes effort to lie. In other words, saying, “No, I didn’t
cheat on you, darling,” or “I swear I used my blinker!” requires
a stimulation of cognition—and thus a rush of oxygenated
blood to the brain. Even the U.S. Pentagon has increased their
research into an MRI-based lie detection program, partially
funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency,
which comes up with ingenious new tools and techniques for
military use.17
But back to marketing. As we’ve seen, this fledgling science
had already made some inroads. In 2002, for example,
Daimler- Chrysler’s research center in the German town of
Ulm used fMRIs to study the brains of consumers while
showing them images of a series of automobiles, including
Mini Coopers and Ferraris. And what they found was that as
the subjects gazed at a slide of a Mini Cooper, a discrete region
in the back area of the brain that responds to faces came
alive. The fMRI had just pinpointed the essence of the Mini
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Cooper’s appeal. Above and beyond the car’s “wide bulldog
stance,” “ultra- rigid body,” “1.6L 16-valve alloy engine,” and
“6 airbags with side protection” (goodies lauded on the car’s
Web site),18 the Mini Cooper registered in subjects’ brains as
an adorable face. It was a gleaming little person, Bambi on
four wheels, or Pikachu with an exhaust pipe. You just wanted
to pinch its little fat metallic cheeks, then drive it away.
There’s no doubt that babies’ faces have a strong effect on
our brains. In a University of Oxford study involving an imaging
technique known as magnetoencephalography, neuroscientist
Morten L. Kringelbach asked 12 adults to carry out a
computer task while the faces of infants and adults (similar in
expression) flashed onto a nearby screen. According to Scientific
American, “While the volunteers ultimately processed the
faces using the brain regions that normally handle such a task,
all the participants showed an early, distinct response to the infant
faces alone.” More specifically, “Within one-seventh of a
second, a spike in activity occurred in the medial orbitofrontal
cortex, an area above the eye sockets linked to the detection
of rewarding stimuli.” In other words, according to Kringelbach,
the volunteers’ brains seemed to identify infants’ faces
as somehow special.19
More intriguing revelations followed. Daimler-Chrysler researchers
then displayed images of sixty-six different cars to a
dozen men, again scanning their brains using the fMRI. This
time, the sports cars stimulated the region of the brain associated
with “reward and reinforcement” according to Henrik
Walter, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist involved in the study.
And what is often the most rewarding thing for guys? Sex. It
seemed, just as male peacocks attract female mates with the
iridescence of their back feathers, the males in this study sub-
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consciously sought to attract the opposite sex with the lowrising,
engine- revving, chrome pizzazz of the sports car. Walter
even took it one step further, explaining that just as female
birds reject male birds with scrawny plumages—the peacockequivalent
of a comb-over—in favor of the most preening,
showstopping birds because the length and sheen of a male
peacock’s plumage correlate directly to the bird’s vigor, virility,
and social status, so do women prefer men with a showy,
slinky sports car: “If you are strong and successful as an animal,
you can afford to invest energy in such a pointless thing,”
Walter points out.
In essence, neuroscience revealed what I’d always believed:
that brands are much more than just recognizable products
wrapped in eye- catching designs. Yet at the time, all previous
neuroimaging tests had focused on a particular product. The
brain scan study I decided to undertake would be the first
attempt to examine not just a specific brand—whether a
Heineken, a Honda Civic, a Gillette razor, or a Q-tip—but to
explore what the concept “brand” really means to our brains.
If I could sneak a peek inside consumers’ heads to find out
why some products worked, while others fell flat on their
faces, I knew my study could not only transform the way companies
designed, marketed, and advertised their products—
but also help each one of us understand what is really going on
inside our brains when we make decisions about what we buy.
So what the heck was I supposed to do next?
The obvious next stage was to find the best scientists—and
the most sophisticated instruments around—to help me carry
out this experiment. Ultimately, I decided to combine two
methods, SST, the advanced version of the electro en ceph a lo -
graph; and fMRI. I chose these for a number of reasons. Neib
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ther instrument is invasive. Neither involves radiation. And
both are able to measure the level of emotional attraction (or
revulsion) we as consumers experience more precisely than
any other tool available.
FMRI, as I mentioned earlier, is able to pinpoint an area as
small as one millimeter in the brain. In essence, it takes a
miniature home movie of the brain every few seconds—and
in as little as ten minutes can amass a spectacular amount of
information. Meanwhile, the less expensive SST brings with it
the advantage of being able to measure reactions instantaneously
(while fMRI has a few seconds delay). This made SST
ideal for registering brain activity while people are watching
TV commercials and programs, or any other kind of visual
stimuli happening in real time. Better yet, it’s portable and
travel ready—a kind of movable laboratory (which, believe
me, came in handy when we secured special, unprecedented
permission from the Chinese government to scan the brains
of Chinese consumers).
Ultimately, we based our research on 102 fMRI scans and
1,979 SST studies. Why not half-and-half? A typical fMRI
brain scan, which involves design, analysis, conducting the experiment,
and interpreting the results, can be expensive. SST
studies are far less costly. Even so, our fMRI studies were almost
twice as extensive as any conducted to date.
Until we began our research, no one had ever mixed and
matched fMRI and SST on behalf of a broad-scale neuromarketing
study. If you think of the brain as a house, any and
all previous experiments were based on looking through a single
window, but our wide- ranging study promised to cast its
gaze through as many windows, cracks, floorboards, attic windows,
and mouse holes as we could find.
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But this study wasn’t going to come cheap, and I knew that
without corporate backing, it was dead in the water. But when
I get an idea in my head that keeps me up at night, I’m persistent.
Politely pushy, you might call it. Those twenty- seven
messages on your answering machine? They’re all from me
(sorry). Nevertheless, in spite of all my efforts, business after
business turned me down. The people I approached were either
intrigued-but- unconvinced, or intrigued-but-spooked.
And of course, with a brain- scanning experiment this ambitious,
backers weren’t without their ethical concerns. “Orwellian”—
that’s the most frequently heard reaction when
people hear the word neuromarketing. A recent New York Times
Magazine cover story touching on the law and brain imaging
noted a widespread fear among scholars that brain scanning is
a “kind of super mind- reading device” that threatens the privacy
and “mental freedom” of citizens.20
But to be honest, I didn’t share these ethical concerns. As
I said in the introduction, neuromarketing isn’t about implanting
ideas in people’s brains, or forcing them to buy what they
don’t want to buy; it’s about uncovering what’s already inside
our heads—our Buyology. Our willing volunteers were genuinely
excited to take part in the birth of a new science. There
were no complaints. No adverse reactions, no side effects, no
health risks. Everyone knew what they were doing, and they
were fully briefed before they signed on. And in the end, a
hospital ethics committee oversaw every detail and aspect of
our study, ensuring that nothing could go forward until we’d
cleared it with them first.
Finally, one company said they were willing to give neuromarketing
a shot. Followed by another company. Then another.
A few months later, I’d secured all the resources I
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needed from eight multinational corporations. Finally, I put in
some money of my own.
Now, I was faced with the largest operational and logistical
headache I’ve ever come up against: finding a huge number of
volunteers—2,081 at final count—from a handful of countries
around the world. Why? First, I didn’t want anyone claiming
that the sample population I came up with was in any way
too narrow or limited. Plus, our research had to be global, because
the work I do is global, and because in today’s world,
companies and brands are global as well.
So I settled on a final five countries: America, because it’s
home to Madison Avenue and Hollywood; Germany, because
it’s the most advanced country in the world as far as neuromarketing
is concerned; England, because it’s where Dr.
Calvert’s company is based; Japan, because there’s no rougher,
tougher place in the world to launch a new product; and
China, because it’s by far the world’s largest emerging market.
Cut to a few months later, when I found myself in a Los
Angeles studio, surrounded by hundreds of volunteers, attired
in SST caps, electrodes, wires, and goggles, all glued to a TV
screen watching Simon Cowell, Paula Abdul, and Randy Jackson
perched in their red chairs like a high-school disciplinary
committee. Simon idly sipped a Coke as across the stage, a guy
with sideburns and a Hawaiian shirt warbled an off-key rendition
of the Monkees’ “Daydream Believer.”
By exploring viewers’ responses to one of the most popular
TV shows in America, our first experiment would answer
the first question I was posing—does product placement
really work, or was it, despite what advertisers and consumers
alike have long believed, a colossal waste of money?
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