The Science of Buying – Martin Lindstrom

What makes people buy? The question’s been so oft asked and answered by multitudes of marketers, designers, and behavioral scientists over decades that I’m quite sure we can skip the standard textbook answers from these three camps. In the last 4 years though, I’ve gotten a fairly good idea of factors at play in the retail store environment. This coming from sales and marketing experience for a few consumer product manufacturers, and having read some amazing books from Paco Underhill (“Why We Buy”), Kate Newlin (“Shopportunity”), and Pamela Danziger (“Shopping”).

So Martin Lindstrom is a gentleman who kindly sent me his book to review last Fall, which I voraciously read over the soonest weekend. Buyology is a book that’s probably best described from this Publisher’s Weekly description on Amazon:

“Through extensive and expensive research, Lindstrom provides an adequate primer on what neuroscience studies can tell society—particularly marketers—about how selling (and more important, buying) works. Whether considering the roles of sex, religion, product placement or contradictions in consumer habits between what they say and what they do, Lindstrom explores how brain-scan studies reveal an avalanche of information about what works and what doesn’t.”

From the various chapters, here are their summaries and my thoughts:

Study Details

2,180 volunteers from U.S., England, Germany, Japan, and China. Sought answers to these kinds of questions: Does product placement work? To what degree do brand logos still have power? How is subliminal advertising taking place? Does religion influence purchasing behavior? How do disclaimers and warnings affect purchasing? Does sex in advertising work? The book is on neuroscience and brands.

Product Placement

We have no memory of brands that don’t play an integral part in the storyline/plot of a program. Those which are tied along well will be much more memorable, and will weaken our ability to remember other brands. The question of efficacy comes down to asking whether the placement makes sense within the narrative and if it’s relevant to the context?

Mirror Neurons

Wikipedia explanation or mine: perceptive nerve cells which create internal reactions by releasing dopamine/other chemicals. The Brodmann area 10 of the brain is supposed to be the ‘cool’ identification region.

Subliminal Ads

Logo-free images work best, by associated image emotions acting on reward & craving centers of the brain.

Rituals, Shared Beliefs, and Stories

This relates to common daily/monthly/seasonal activities, personal and shared beliefs (whether true or not), and stories as the means they’re solidified in our minds. Affiliating a brand to one of these is common and can be very sticky. However, trying to extend brand affiliation to other contexts or rituals can become futile. Our memory acts an intuition guide on which scenarios have natural, open, or questionably brand fit. Collection activities are powerful rituals. Martin goes on to humorously talk about his frantic Lego collection as a kid, building a Legoland in his backyard and getting many visits after placing a newspaper ad, whereupon some Lego employees came and while they enjoyed his creations, advised he’d have to change his name - which he did and later on worked for the company.

Religion

Among all faiths there are many common attributes. Most successful brands have elements of religions. These include:

1. Sense of belonging/community
2. Clear mission, unambiguous vision
3. Desire to overcome and exert power over enemies/identifiable “Other”
4. Sensory appeal
5. Storytelling
6. Evangelism
7. Symbols
8. Mystery

Logos are unimportant for emotional branding for devotional products/services. Lovemarks are just indicators to the user experience.

Somatic Markers

Indicators for positive/negative sensory experiences that typically draw associations between two incompatible scenarios. Based on past experiences of reward & punishment, conditioning to events. Fear and insecurity can be strong drivers for mental associations. These markers act as intuition, strong impressions, and cognitive shortcuts for activities to be done. They’re created over time and every day.

Senses

Eyes are much less potent than they’re acclaimed them to be. The reason is that attention nowadays is hard to get and hold. Logos don’t matter in sensory perception. See & smell combinations can work well though, for positive and negative emotional reactions. Touch is important in some user impression-forming and purchase consideration scenarios, for example electronics and textiles. Sometimes unique colors can be spellbound to particular brands when strategically employed in their graphic, industrial, and environmental design. Sound/image combinations can also form strong impressions. Ultimately, sensory experiences can either form an immediate positive/negative regard (in new encounters), or create anchors for future encounters, where the previous emotional responses will be fired off automatically in response to sensory stimuli.

Sex

Sure it can be powerful in grabbing momentary attention, however in advertisement testing there is very poor/no brand recollection. Secondly, there’s even worse brand recall if the ads surround sexual-themed programming. The general idea is that its inclusion is distracting altogether, and can hinder desired action the brand wants the user to take. Controversy on the other hand sells better than sex, as the brand attention is more influential rather than the suggestive/explicit content itself.

Using extreme beauty (models) and celebrities in brand affiliation can be ineffective for recall, as people will momentarily admire the individual much more than notice a brand. What we are attracted to is people in ads who look like us or could reasonably be us - through appearance, activities, lifestyle, etc.

Sex, in general, has the effect on mirror neurons of evoking desire and affinity (“They’re cute” - “I’d like to look as sexy as them”). For this reason, sexuality in advertisements will be around for a long time, as their function is wish fulfillment. If saturated exposure characterizes the user experience, more effective forms of deploying sexuality will involve being sneakier, subtler, and under the direct conscious radar.

Summary

So traditional market research can only go so far. Neuroscience has and will continue to add advanced understanding of why people behave the way they do, as sometimes we may not even know ourselves

Tagged as: beliefs, branding, martin lindstrom, memory, mirror neurons, neuroscience, product placement, psychology, religion, rituals, sensory experiences, sex, somatic markers, subliminal advertising