ResearchTalk

We talk to Martin Lindstrom from his New York City hotel.

Just hours after Barack Obama is elected US President, Lindstrom is getting ready to leave the US for his European book tour, the US tour having generated over 700 articles, including many in the mainstream press and an appearance on the couch of TV’s The Today Show.

It’s his bid to popularise the business book: “I realised that no one reads business books any more…what people, including business people, really read is novels…that’s the style I’ve tried adopting in Buyology.”

And the book is indeed a pleasant, easy read. But that’s one of the criticisms levelled at it by the Bob Barocci, CEO of the Advertising Research Foundation, who apparently dismissed the book in an Advertising Age article by saying that the ARF did not review “pop” books.

Notwithstanding that, the book has received widespread praise and is a bestseller.

So, just what is Buyology all about?

The experiment
“Buyology,” according to Lindstrom’s website, “unveils the results of marketing guru Martin Lindstrom’s pioneering three-year, $7 million dollar study that used the latest in brain scan technology (fMRI and SST) to peer into the minds of over 2,000 people from around the world. The shocking results will reveal why so much of what we thought we knew about why we buy is wrong. Buyology rewrites the rules of marketing and advertising.” Bold claims indeed.

Lindstrom’s inspiration came from a 2004 study by Dr. Read Montague, director of the Human Neuroimaging Lab, who wanted to understand why Coke remained dominant despite Pepsi’s success in taste tests.

These tests were conducted using conventional research and so Montague decided to see if neuromarketing would reveal something different. Sure enough, after examining brain activity, Montague concluded that people weren’t making brand decisions based on taste but on the emotional impact of the brand, and that since Coke was more successful than Pepsi at ‘implanting’ the impression of a quality brand, it had ultimately won peoples’ affections.

Although this conclusion was not universally shared, according to David Penn, MD of Conquest Research, the study did inspire a number of enterprising companies into this space. Penn has taken a close interest in neuromarketing.

One of the inspired was Lindstrom, and he set about designing his own study.

Hypotheses
Aware of the ethics surrounding the use of neuromarketing, and being an unproven technique, Lindstrom was careful to choose a topic for his study that would ruffle as few feathers as possible: “You will always find critical voices no matter how deep you go into things. What I tried to do was to…go into areas where we could be fairly safe about the conclusions we could draw.”

One area that intrigued him was why public policy measures seemed to have little impact on discouraging smoking. He figured neuromarketing could give him the peek into the parts of human behaviour that traditional research couldn’t reach, namely the sub-conscious.

So, armed with an extensive contacts book of wealthy corporates, he began his drive for sponsors. But even he, a globally successful figure in strategic marketing, found it difficult to raise the $7m needed. The issue: corporates were frightened off by the ethical issues around neuromarketing.

But through dogged persistence he managed to convert enough of them. And with eight out of ten product launches failing within three months, you can probably understand why corporates were keen to get involved with something that could improve the odds.

Let’s look at a couple of key things he found.

Tobacco
Lindstrom’s work on smokers confirmed what he believed – that health warnings on tobacco boxes have little impact on smoking behaviour. The results applied whether the warnings were subtle (US) or more brazen (e.g. photos in the UK).

However, he discovered something he hadn’t expected: that rather than deter smoking, warning messages actually encouraged cravings. Completely counter-intuitive, he naturally asked the researchers to re-check the results.

Lindstrom offers an explanation. He believes that as people get used to warnings, they start to perceive them as images rather than text. The ‘image’ then becomes strongly associated with the brand or product. And because the product in question generates positive feelings (cravings), so do any associated images.

It’s the reason why, e.g., the Silk Cut tobacco brand tried to ‘own’ the association with a sheet of purple silk before the advertising ban started; in subsequent tests, 98% correctly attributed purple silk to Silk Cut.

Based on these conclusions, public policy seems to have failed dismally.

Product placement
As the effectiveness of conventional TV advertising deteriorates, product placement is on the rise: “It will be the number one way, I think the concept of the television commercial is dying.”

But based on the study, Lindstrom believes that product placement itself fails much of the time: “We’ve gone from a stage where you feel that just because you’ve put your logo [in the program] you’ve done your job. Well, guess what? You’ve done the opposite job instead.”

He cites the work done with American Idol, the popular TV show. Ford and Coke are two key sponsors. Both pay the same fee and yet Coke achieves far higher brand recall.

Why? Lindstrom reckons it’s because Coke has integrated the brand more deeply and seamlessly into the show. Coke is sipped by the judges. Furniture evokes the shape of its bottles. There are Coke-red walls. And Coke airs commercials during the breaks.

In contrast, Ford chooses to just run conventional ads. during the breaks with no intrusion into the programme itself (except for a logo placed out of context – logos are less important than brand associations such as images, colours, smells, sounds).

The surprising finding is that not only does Ford get much lower recall than Coke, Ford’s recall actually declined as a result of the sponsorship!
Bizarre? Well, Lindstrom says that effective product placement has a “double-barrelled” impact: (a) brand recall goes up, and (b) recall of other brands goes down. It’s as though the brain has limited capacity such that making memory space available for one brand reduces the space available to others.

No doubt these findings will cause some discomfort in the automaker, as well as with advertising agencies charged with product placement.

Efficacy
Lindstrom says that ad. agencies are generally sceptical of Buyology. Notable exceptions include Saatchi’s Kevin Roberts, author of Lovemarks, the book about increasing the emotional quotient of brands.

There are other neuro-sceptics. Among them is Conquest’s Penn (although he remains open-minded).

Penn maintains that the reason neuromarketing failed to advance much since 2004 is a failure to understand that the 2004 Pepsi study showed correlation rather than causation (something the study’s authors were at pains to point out). It did not prove – as some neuromarketers have since claimed – that there is a ‘buy button’ in the brain.

As Professor Lawrence Parsons of Sheffield University puts it: “This is the problem with all neuroscience. We don’t really know what we are seeing when we watch the brain work. Is it the thing itself – the thought, the flash of insight – or just an aspect of it, the bark rather than the dog? We’re just not at the point where we can answer these big interpretive questions.”

While Lindstrom accepts that neuromarketing still has to prove itself, he says that the Pepsi study was generally convincing. He maintains that the main reason neuromarketing failed to advance much was ethics: “After interviewing 300 people on this topic, most felt the main issue was ethical….it was a real struggle to raise the money…no one wanted to be associated with the study, but now sponsors are happy to go public.”

To satisfy any doubts there may be about his study, Lindstrom has offered to open it up to scrutiny: “…under the circumstances that we are working against the same agenda.” He has already shown it to Millward Brown and Ipsos and says they are “…incredibly positive towards the study…and fairly comfortable about it.”

The end of research as we know it?
In 2004, Lindstrom believed neuromarketing would make traditional research techniques redundant. Having completed the study he still holds the view. But being more aware of the shortcomings of neuromarketing and issues around market acceptance, he believes the process will take longer. But dominate, he believes, it will.

This is where neuro-sceptics are bound to have an issue. Penn strongly believes that neuromarketing will never be able to survive without complimentary qualitative (the ‘what’ will always need the ‘why’).

Penn has taken a different developmental route. For example, acknowledging that traditional research lacks sensitivity, he has developed a non-invasive, non-verbal questioning method (Metaphorix) that avoids both conventional pitfalls and the issues with neuromarketing. Lindstrom acknowledges this as a useful contribution but remains a steadfast supporter of neuromarketing nonetheless.

In fact, he has established Buyology Inc., a New York-based neuromarketing company with the intent of maturing the discipline as fast as possible, so as to help bring down costs (from $250,000 to around $60,000 a project) and reduce timings (one part of Lindstrom’s study took two years to develop).

He anticipates that Buyology will have a marked impact over a two-year period, but that more significant change may take at least a decade: “By significant change I mean that one format or another of neuromarketing is going to be implemented or used in almost every major campaign activity for major brands in the world. At least thirteen out of the largest 100 US brands are using neuromarketing in their strategy implementation right now. I know that because I work for these companies.”