The Buying Brain: Secrets for Selling to the Subconscious Mind (4 page)

The challenge for marketers and product developers is obvious. “How do I get into that 40 bits of consciously considered information?” That’s what this book is about.

It is written for marketers and businesspeople. There are enough books about the brain that make me go “wow!” They are written by neuroscientists, social scientists, and psychologists. They create a sense of wonder for the brain and what it does.

In this book I tackle the question that my Fortune 500 clients ask me, “Brain science is nice, but,
so what
? Tell me how I use this knowledge. How do I change my brand strategy using neuromarketing? How do I change product design and pricing using neuromarketing? How do I analyze packages to make sure they will pop on the shelf? Are there things I should be doing in the store in the aisles to make our consumers desire our products? How can I make sure I get the returns on our investment in advertising?”

“And by the way,” (clients tell me) “neuromarketing cannot be a set of

‘cool, cute ideas,’ but must be a systematic process and framework that can live and flourish in the workplace and workflow of my corporation.”

This book explains those frameworks, workflows, and processes that enable a Chief Executive Officer (CEO), Chief Marketing Officer (CMO), Vice President of Brands, Vice President of Insights, and a Market Researcher to implement brain-based marketing in a corporation. These frameworks are born from analyzing thousands of brands, products, designs, pricing mechanisms, P1: OTA/XYZ

P2: ABC

c01

JWBT296-Pradeep

June 5, 2010

13:27

Printer Name: Courier Westford, Westford, MA

$1 Trillion to Persuade the Brain

5

packages, in-store Point-of-Sale (POS) elements, Web storefronts, TV advertising, print advertising, Internet advertising, and more in our NeuroLabs across the world.

The frameworks and actionable concepts presented in this book will also be invaluable to those in the supply chain: brand marketing consultants, product designers, pricing clinicians, package design firms, in-store designers, Web design firms, and advertising agencies.

The interplay of conscious and subconscious processes in the human brain presents a fundamental challenge for people in the business of developing products and getting other people to buy and try them. Marketers and product developers have suspected this for years.

If people do not have access to all the sources of their decisions and behaviors, then
they can’t tell us why they do what they do
. So if we only listen to their articulated reports of what they like and don’t like, we may well be led astray. An 80 percent failure rate of new products in the marketplace, with all the economic costs that implies, gives us some pretty strong evidence that this is the case!

The problem for marketers and product developers is how to find out what people really want and need. That’s where brain scientists come in.

I love helping companies do marketing and product development. I love being able to apply these new neuro-based tools to making products and messages more effective. The business I lead has worked with many companies—large and small, domestic and global—and I can tell you this: Companies come to us with humility and tremendous respect for their current and potential customers. They all want to know the same things: r Do consumers notice us?

r Do consumers like us?

r Do consumers remember us?

In a free marketplace of competing ideas, the consumer is, and will remain, the boss. Giant corporations still rise and fall at the whim of the consumer, based on their ability to meet that consumer’s wants and needs better than their competition.

So here are the basic principles that drive everything you are going to read in this book.

r Neuromarketing provides a real competitive advantage in a crowded and cluttered marketplace.

P1: OTA/XYZ

P2: ABC

c01

JWBT296-Pradeep

June 5, 2010

13:27

Printer Name: Courier Westford, Westford, MA

6

The Buying Brain

r While the languages of people and the ways they express themselves change from country to country and culture to culture, the language of the brain is universal, thus opening the door for global norms.

r Neuro-design of products and services opens the door to design products and services that appeal to the inner truths and aesthetic sensibilities within all of us.

r Every aspect of brands, products, packages, in-store, and advertising is changed by neuromarketing today, and that trend is explosive.

r My goal is to get you to put the book down and apply what you learned in your work tomorrow.

P1: OTA/XYZ

P2: ABC

c02

JWBT296-Pradeep

June 5, 2010

13:45

Printer Name: Courier Westford, Westford, MA

Technology

At the end of this chapter, you’ll know and be able to use the
following:

r Why it’s critical to use a dense array of EEG sensors to cover the whole brain

r Why neurological testing can rely on sample sizes far smaller than surveys and even some focus groups, and get results that are more scientifically accurate

r The differences between EEG, fMRI, and biometrics So much attention is being paid to the advances that neuromarketing is making in today’s marketplace that its origins have gone largely unnoticed. I want to shine a little light on the reasons why this marriage of science and marketing was consummated, and the driving forces behind it.

It usually surprises audiences I address to learn that electroencephalography (EEG), the basic technology underlying most brainwave-based neuromarketing and the form of neurological testing that we use at NeuroFocus, is not really new. In fact, it is the staple methodology used in neuroscience laboratories around the world.

Hans Berger made the first practical application of EEG measurement in the 1920s. He was the first scientist to design sensors to pick up electrical signals naturally emanating from the brain, and his discovery is directly responsible for our ability today to capture brainwave activity as accurately and reliably as we do. He understood from the start that his invention could and should be used to measure the brain’s full range of activity, not just an extremely small portion of it. When you consider how limited the state of neuroscience knowledge was some eight decades ago compared to today, Dr. Berger’s comprehension and foresight is all the more impressive.

7

P1: OTA/XYZ

P2: ABC

c02

JWBT296-Pradeep

June 5, 2010

13:45

Printer Name: Courier Westford, Westford, MA

8

The Buying Brain

But in some key respects, his invention was the classic example of a great idea ahead of its time. EEG sensors could acquire the previously elusive tiny microvolts of electricity that are produced by brain activity, but the technology to integrate and fully analyze them was lacking. It would remain so until the advent of transistors, microprocessors, and the subsequent blossoming of digital technology many years later. Combined, these elements enabled us to untangle the complex interplay of brain electrical dynamics. It really took matching microchips with those microvolts before we could take full advantage of Berger’s Flapper Age discovery.

It was quite a span of time from the Depression to the Digital Dawn, but EEG methodology coupled with fast, large memory-capacity computers enabled scientists at last to explore and, most importantly, understand the inner workings of the brain for the first time. However, even today, with all the processing power we have at our fingertips, we are still plumbing the depths of this amazing organ and making new discoveries on a daily basis.

Cortical Geography

The second element in the birth of neuromarketing is what we have learned about the brain’s basic structure and the way it functions. Hopefully you won’t tire of this fact, because I mention it in these pages several times, but it is central to grasp the concept that
the brain is really an incredibly complex
and interwoven series of neural networks.
The chapters on the brain and the senses delve into this phenomenon in great detail, but it’s worth noting here because it is at the core of EEG measurement of brainwave activity.

There are seemingly endless statistics about the brain, but a few call out for mention here:

The brain—that supercomputer inside your skull—is capable of roughly 200 million billion calculations per second.

This massive interconnectivity is what enables the human brain to perform all the amazing things we do, from walking upright and chewing gum at the same time, to scoring operas, performing brain surgery, and everything in between. As much as we have learned by isolating and identifying the brain’s many specific regions and structures, if we hope to understand the real majesty and meaning of our minds, we have to adopt a “systems approach.”

P1: OTA/XYZ

P2: ABC

c02

JWBT296-Pradeep

June 5, 2010

13:45

Printer Name: Courier Westford, Westford, MA

Neuromarketing Technology

9

Hans Berger’s breakthrough paved the way towards gaining that neurological knowledge.

A man-made supercomputer has about 60,000 miles of wiring inside. The brain’s equivalent amount of interconnectivity would amount to more than 200,000 miles of “wiring”!

One more statistic illustrates how important full-brain measurement is for neuroscience, medicine, and neuromarketing:

Sixteen EEG sensors are the minimum number required by a clinical standard for determining brain death in humans.

This is why NeuroFocus applies high density arrays of EEG sensors to cover the full brain. Only this full brain coverage provides marketers with the entire scope of brainwave activity that occurs across multiple brain regions.

Measurement across the entire brain is critical for understanding how the brain is responding to stimuli.

As groundbreaking as this combination of neuroscience with digital technology has been, it would not have given birth to neuromarketing without a third causative effect at work. And that is the state of market research methodologies and challenges at the dawn of the neuromarketing age.

Market Research Challenges

and Opportunities

The fact is, as sophisticated, and in many ways useful, as market research has become in modern economies, there have always been fundamental shortcomings associated with the various methodologies that are employed. These flaws have vexed both clients and researchers for decades, and no one has been able to devise comprehensive solutions without a deeper understanding of the brains being studied.

There are two basic reasons for this: first, traditional methods are inherently unable to duplicate what the brain does, how it operates, and how it forms perceptions of things like products, services, stores, ads, and everything else connected with modern marketing.