Buyology: A Book Review. Or, How Brands Can Use Science to Get Religion

Attention marketers: Forget consumer focus groups and surveys.  Instead, increase your market research budget and go for a little neuromarketing research.   It might just save you a costly failed product launch or teach you why interacting with your brand needs to be equal to a religious experience.

Martin Lindstrom's latest book, "Buyology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy" is just out.  It's the book for you if:

• Like me, you are fascinated by how brands are built and how they influence our purchase decisions
• You're a marketing leader who, like me, has struggled to convince your fact-based executive team about the importance of building an emotionally powerful brand
• Like me, you're a shopping enthusiast who wonders why shopping makes you feel so good or why you bought those shoes that you'll never wear

After years of extensive (and yes, expensive) neuromarketing research, Lindstrom is able to reveal how our subconscious brains respond to marketing messages (or not) and how purchase decisions are made.  Over 90% of consumer buying decisions are made in the subconscious, says Lindstrom, so understanding how the subconscious works is the key to the cash register. 

Yes, they did indeed strap research volunteers up to all kinds of machines and watch their brain activity while they watched commercials, looked at brand imagery, listened to ring tones and even smelled things.

While the book is chocked full of findings, it's an easy and enjoyable read that never overwhelms with the academia.  The findings are in some ways validating to all of us who believe in the power of strong brands, but are in just as many ways humbling, as we see example after example of marketing execution that falls flat with the brainwaves.

Among my favorite takeaways from this research, in no particular order: 

• Brands and religion are a lot alike. Strong brands produce brain activity patterns identical to religious images.  And no wonder, says Lindstrom, since powerful brands adopt the same  foundational pillars as religions, such as the use of symbols, storytelling, rituals, a sense of belonging, a clear vision,grandeur etc.
• Shopping is sensory, and pictures aren't enough.  Brain activity swings in the favor of a brand if there are associated smells and sounds in addition to familiar visual cues. For those of us in retail,it's a rallying cry to up the ante on the sensory components of our e-commerce sites and stores.
• Customers say no when they really mean yes.  As we all have witnessed, what people say they do and what they actually do are two different things.  In one memorable chapter, research subjects say that they don't like a TV show they just watched, while their brain activity indicates that they really do like it.  The show turns out to be a hit.
• Subliminal advertising is not only alive and well, it's marvelously effective. In a case of true irony, the cigarette companies have become masters at this, given that they can't advertise in "normal" ways.  And guess what? Those warning signs that they're required to put on the packages? They actually make smokers want to smoke more, not less.
• Mirror Neurons.  You've got them. Sure, everyone wants to be an individual, but whether you admit it or not, you like to buy what other people are buying and do what they are doing.  Mirror neurons. You've got them, and they cause you to mimic other people's buying behavior. Maybe a reason why "best sellers" and customer reviews are so popular on our e-commerce sites?

Oh, and don't worry.  In case you were wondering, Lindstrom does have a chapter on the use of sex in marketing.  I'm sure you're dying to know whether or not it really works. In the spirit of continuing Buyology's research, let's see if that's enough to entice you to buy the book.

Comments

[Jonathan Salem Baskin]

Most of the 'science' behind neuromarketing isn't terribly new or conclusive: human beings remember some things better or more clearly than others, and meaning is a construct of context and personal experience. I'm not sure this is a revelation at all, actually: the Greeks wrote plays about it thousands of years ago.

Brand experts are madly searching for ways to defend their preconceived notions of marketing as a mind-control (or influencing) endeavor. Facing difficult economic times and constant challenges from employers and clients to make brand and marketing expenditures more relevant to sales, marketers need to step up and deliver.

So I find it fascinating that anybody would choose to dive deeper into the vagaries of mind or brain science, rather than 'work the other way' and experiment with defining brand more externally...in terms of the behaviors by companies and their consumers that constitute the complex dance of inquiry, transaction, and service.

You don't need sensitive sensing devices or religious faith to see and map the chronologies and dependencies of commercial relationships, so why not build models of brand that don't influence those actions but rather emerge FROM them? Brand as behavior, not thought or intent.

Anyway, I write a lot about the potential implications in my book, Branding Only Works on Cattle, and my chapter on the challenges of brand measurement is available for download for a short time on my site: http://tinyurl.com/5ne379