Pushing the buy buttons
As the old ways of reaching customers grow less and less effective, marketers are using increasingly esoteric research to crack the code and sell more.
In a leafy suburb about 15 minutes from downtown Atlanta, a magnetic resonance imaging machine is whirring to life. Under most circumstances, a person receiving an MRI scan feels a sense of dread and uncertainty: is it a tumor? Multiple sclerosis? Evidence of a stroke? The machine begins its incessant hammering noise as the electrical current rises in gradient magnets opposed by the main magnetic field, so strong it can pull objects across rooms. You’re trapped, flat on your back, in an enclosed space. An MRI scan is an uncomfortable, lonely and often scary way to spend half an hour.
Yet the people at Emory University are not battling disease or illness. As the MRI process continues, images are flashed before the subject’s eyes - cars, people, products – and elicit different brain responses. But it is the lighting up of one particular area – the ventromedial prefrontal cortex – that interests these researchers. That is the region associated with preference or, more precisely, your sense of self. And for advertisers, manufacturers and retailers struggling to understand just what makes consumers tick, the prefrontal cortex seems the closest thing to a map.
“A lot of what motivates our behavior occurs below the level of conscious awareness,” the research director of the Atlanta consulting firm working with Emory, BrightHouse Neurostrategies Group’s Justine Meaux, told The Atlanta Constitution-Journal last year. “We give [companies] insight into how to develop relationships with consumers.”
Meaux would not be interviewed for this article, despite repeated requests. Indeed, after enthusiastically discussing the emerging field of “neuromarketing” in recent years, those involved are now significantly less forthcoming amid growing cynicism about the motivation of their research. All deny the holy grail is a “buy button” in our brains – we are, apparently, much more sophisticated than that – yet opponents are already lining up, lobbying the United States Congress and raising frightening claims of potential misuse.
BrightHouse’s research at Emory was halted last year after complaints led by Commercial Alert, a non-profit group at the forefront of demanding answers about neuromarketing. In a letter to Emory president James Wagner, Commercial Alert executive director Gary Ruskin argued universities “exist to free the mind, and enlighten it”. “They do not exist to find new ways to subjugate the mind and manipulate it for commercial gain,” Ruskin wrote, later saying much the same to Senate Commerce Committee chairman John McCain as Commercial Alert sought an investigation into neuromarketing.
“Those with a stake in this new research predictably (and understandably) try to make it sound like nothing special,” Ruskin says. “Leave aside the dubious prospect that corporations are going to pay money for a technology that causes people to buy less. The argument just accentuates the basic question, which is: in a democracy such as ours, should anyone have such power to manipulate the behavior of the rest of us?”
**
Manipulating behavior is, of course, what marketing and advertising is all about. A man standing on a street corner handing out discount vouchers is fundamentally no different to a television advertisement costing a million dollars or a mammoth billboard: the purpose is to get you to spend money. Fortunately, at a base level, the decision about whether you do remains yours alone.
Yet manufacturers, retailers and marketers are realizing that while the actual decision to buy is ultimately beyond their control, there are many ways people can be nudged in their direction. The prefrontal cortex is central to this way of thinking, which seeks to place a scientific explanation on what may once have been simply attributed to dumb luck – someone having a seeming knack for selling, or one product inexplicably succeeding while rivals flounder. That is because marketers are beginning to believe that in a world where products seem increasingly alike and commoditized, consumer loyalty may have little to do with size, color, convenience or even price – and everything to do with what happens to that small portion of your brain.
An example. In the summer of 2003, neuroscientist Read Montague at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, conducted his own “Pepsi Challenge”: where consumers taste test Pepsi and Coke. When subjects were unaware which drink was which, about half preferred Pepsi. When told of the brands, about three-quarters said Coke tasted better and MRI tests shows the prefrontal cortex lighting up like a neon sign. Publishing his findings in Neuron last October, Montague and his colleagues concluded “brand knowledge for one of the drinks had a dramatic influence on expressed behavioral preferences and on the measured brain responses”.
In the words of the worldwide chief executive of Saatchi & Saatchi, Kevin Roberts, the drinkers had “an emotional connection”: their long knowledge of Coke, their perceptions of its image and memories associated with it overrode objectivity on taste alone. It is precisely that relationship that people like Roberts are seeking to develop in a sales environment where consumers are empowered by information, swamped by choice and traditional advertising mediums – free-to-air television in particular – are reaching fewer and fewer eyeballs.
“What you have to create is what I call loyalty beyond reason,” Roberts says from his downtown New York office. “When I was growing up in the 80s, the brands had the power. Then we saw in the 90s this complete transformation where Wal-Mart became the world’s biggest company – Wal-Mart now does 17 per cent of Procter & Gamble’s global business. So retailers had the power. What’s happened now is the power has switched from the retailer to the consumer. [Consumers are saying:] ‘You’ve got to emotionally connect with me and you’ve to reach me in a way that I don’t have to think, I don’t have to listen, I just have to feel’.”
Given this premise, it is no wonder companies are working so hard to engender customer loyalty by a variety of means. A senior analyst at knowledge service company FIND/SVP, 30-year advertising and marketing veteran Jay Chase, says consumer preferences shaped early in life are lasting: which is why children often buy the same products as their parents; Coca-Cola and other companies pay US schools for exclusive access; and McDonald’s offers toys with meals and kids’ playgrounds. Aiming at older consumers, McDonald’s has now hired an entertainment marketing firm to cut deals for hip-hop artists to cite its Big Mac burger in song lyrics. “Hip hop can make or break a brand,” Lucian James, whose Agenda Inc ranks products by song references, told New York’s Daily News. Agenda’s latest top 10 “American Brandstand” survey includes Cadillac, Rolls-Royce and Gucci.
Of course, marketers have long understood the benefits of celebrity endorsement. One booming related field is product placement in television and movies, where products are not explicitly endorsed by individuals. Experts believe it is a far more effective way of tapping into consumers’ aspirations and the flow of dollars suggests companies agree: market research firm PQ Media says the dollar value of product placement cracked the $US1 billion mark in the US last year as spending on television product placement jumped 46 per cent and film 15 per cent. In case you were wondering, movie product tracker brandchannel.com says Ocean’s Twelve was last year’s biggest culprit with 41 brands featured, although it does not reveal how many were paid placements. The same theory explains the annual designer battle over dressing stars at the Academy Awards.
Another way retailers seek to tie themselves to your image of yourself is within stores. US retailers such as Pottery Barn now sell compact discs of the music they play while you’re shopping, which is carefully chosen to enhance the mood created by the décor. Marketing experts cite global coffee chain Starbucks as the gold standard in this department – although calling it a “coffee” chain may be misleading. Chase says Starbucks is instead marketing a lifestyle – the expensive and arguably not particularly good coffee is merely the cost of entry.
Roberts insists companies need to realize they no longer own their brands – consumers do. “They have to have it imprinted: the consumer is boss,” he says. “The consumer is not paralyzed by choice – the consumer is having a blast. I will choose to absorb a communication or a message when I want, where I want. You’ve got to make sure that when I’m in the mood to think about your product that you are engaging me, not interrupting me.”
**
In 1957 at a movie theater in New Jersey, James Vicary placed a tachistoscope in the projection booth and flashed messages for 1/3000th of a second every five seconds throughout the film Picnic. The messages were imperceptible to theatergoers and encouraged them to drink Coca-Cola and eat popcorn – and sales rose 18.1 per cent and 57.8 per cent respectively as a result. At least, that’s the story. Asked later to recreate the study, Vicary confessed he had falsified data and the amazing effect of subliminal advertising was perhaps not so great, although US Congress in 1974 banned subliminal advertising from television and radio anyway.
The point is that marketers have for decades been trying to reach scientific conclusions about why consumers act as they do – and to capitalize on that knowledge. Neuromarketing was pioneered by Harvard University’s Gerald Zaltman in the late 1990s and he maintains it is “revolutionizing our ability to understand consumers”, according to The Harvard University Gazette. Indeed, researchers last year conducted MRI tests ahead of the November US Presidential election in an effort to determine what issues voters viewed as crucial and to better target advertising. “These new tools could help us someday be less reliant on clichés and unproven adages,” a former strategist for President Bill Clinton, White House aide and research sponsor Tom Freedman told The New York Times. “They’ll help put a bit more science in political science.”
One the key drivers of this kind of research – and the work done by Saatchi & Saatchi’s Roberts and others seeking to foster emotional connections between consumers and products – is a sheer sense of urgency. Companies face a world where the effectiveness of traditional media as an advertising vehicle is waning as audiences fragment, at the very same time that consumers feel more empowered to make decisions than ever. Some companies are even eschewing television and print advertising entirely in favor of guerrilla marketing campaigns – using word-of-mouth and artificially-created street buzz – and other methods designed to make consumers believe they have themselves discovered and road-tested products.
In an environment where more and more advertisers and products are competing for increasingly picky customers, the suggestion neuromarketing could crack that elusive buying code is all the more alluring. “It’s an interesting area of research: whether there is a particular hot button,” says FIND/SVP’s Crane. “I don’t think it’s going to create a need for a product where there is no need. But it will create a lot of understanding.” Roberts has a different take: “If anybody thinks they’ve got the answer, they don’t. I don’t know what the answer is but at least I know the question: how do you get the consumer to buy?”
Published by AFR BOSS, May 2005.