Martin Lindstrom takes us into the mind of a consumer and unpacks what causes us to make purchase decisions in his book, Buyology. He encourages marketers to employ neuromarketing to build effective marketing strategies. This is done through the use of sophisticated neuroimaging machinery to understand the triggers that impact consumers' purchase decisions. He shares a number of key concepts and findings from numerous studies that can help us understand what makes consumers tick and provides us with great examples and tips that we can take inspiration from.
Quick Notes:
People are likely to mimic an action they observe because it triggers their mirror neurons. This often works in tandem with dopamine, our pleasure hormone. This is the reason why people may yawn when they see others yawn, or why people feel a little thirsty seeing a model sip a drink in an ad.
Our brain's somatic markers are shortcuts that trigger automatic responses. These shortcuts are formed from our life experience to lighten the load of understanding situations and making decisions. This is why one might, for example, unconsciously choose a German appliance as there is an inherent association of Germany with technological excellence.
Fear is a powerful emotion to tap on for marketing. People naturally want to avoid negative experiences and a fear of a negative experience can drive one to take immediate action to remove the fear or replace fear with feelings of pleasure. In marketing, these actions are often purchase decisions.
Subliminal messaging are used in marketing, and they work. Appealing to ones subconscious can elicit a desired response due to the associations that we naturally make. These are often tied to our senses. For example the new car smell can push a customer along to buy their dream car. Interestingly, this works counterintuitively as well where hazard warnings on cigarette packs actually feel a need to smoke even more as it drives them to look for pleasure to overcome the negative feelings, and smoking gives them that. This repeated behaviour further solidifies that association.
Brands can take a leaf from religion in building a loyal customer base. Some brands like Oreo use rituals, where a specific method of consumption is shared. Brand mission statements or taglines are often repeated, along with jingles which can draw parallels to hymns. Brands also tend to create an us vs them mentality which increases loyalty (e.g. coke vs pepsi, nike vs adidas etc.). Iconography is a pretty standard tactic with brand logos, so much so that logos of strong brands such as Nike, Apple, and Ferrari can elicit an emotional response that are as strong as those of spiritual followers.
Sex does not sell. In fact sexual content in ads distract users from the actual product itself. Most people surveyed on ad recollection remembered by the sexual content but did not recall the brand or product. Sex can be used as a shock factor to capture an audience's attention, but still needs to be secondary to the brand and product.
Product placements can work only if the product is crucial to the narrative of the show. Having a brand in the background of a show will often be missed easily, but when it is used at a crucial juncture of the plot, it is often remembered as it triggers emotions and associations to the plot.
Neuromarketing can help brands understand their customer's true motivations and adapt their product and messaging accordingly. For example, neuroimaging shows that the medial orbitofrontal cortex, the part of the brain that perceives pleasure, flares up when one picks up an expensive bottle of wine compared to a cheaper one even though they were the exact same wine. This is tied to the perception of increased social status which is their true motivation.
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