Wed 19 Nov 2008
Need to sell more without cutting prices or spending more on ads? It may be possible. Last week, I wrote about Guy Kawasaki’s new compendium of business savvy, Reality Check. One of the little gems he writes about is an experiment that involved selling door to door note cards. A simple but rather weird change in the sales pitch caused the close rate to jump from 40% to 80%: (more…)
Tue 18 Nov 2008
Nice 5-minute interview with Buyology author Martin Lindstrom on Australian TV: Tricks of the Trade.
Wed 12 Nov 2008
If you’ve ever heard one of Guy Kawasaki’s keynotes, you know he’s uniquely irreverent and very, very funny. Fortunately for readers of Reality Check: The Irreverent Guide to Outsmarting, Outmanaging, and Outmarketing Your Competition, Guy writes that way too. One might expect a 461-page business tome to be ponderous… actually, it’s always lively and often hilarious. I finished the book on a cross-country flight, and I’m sure my seatmates thought my occasional bursts of stifled laughter were a sign of either Tourette’s or altitude sickness. (more…)
Wed 5 Nov 2008
There’s little doubt that some macro political factors were decisive in driving Barack Obama’s presidential victory over John McCain. Notably, just as the divisive Iraq war seemed to have turned the corner and started to work to McCain’s advantage instead of Obama’s, the economic crisis gave Obama a whole new issue to blame on the Bush administration and, by inference, on McCain. And there’s little doubt that Obama’s run as a black candidate brought huge numbers of voters to the polls who might not otherwise have participated (no, I don’t mean the deceased or fictitious ones!). Could McCain have overcome this double whammy? It would have been difficult. But, when political marketing experts write the history of this campaign, I think many will lay the blame on John McCain’s failure to light up the amygdalas of the voting public. (more…)
Mon 3 Nov 2008
Altruism in humans is difficult to explain with traditional models of behavior, which have focused on competition between individuals for mates, scarce resources, etc. It’s undeniable, though, that being willing to help unrelated individuals is a common (though not universal) trait. In past Neuromarketing posts Taxes Aren’t Painful and The Joy of Giving vs. the Pain of Buying, I wrote about fMRI studies that showed how altruistic behavior activated the brain’s reward centers. Now, there’s new research that suggests altruistic behavior makes one attractive to the opposite sex: (more…)
Wed 29 Oct 2008
Both the traditional press and bloggers have jumped on Martin Lindstom’s Buyology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy. The opinons range from fascinated to horrified, and dismissive to enthusiastic. We learned that the scheduled 60 Minutes segment on Buyology was cancelled in favor of covering the global economic meltdown, but the mere fact that the CBS news show filmed a segment on a marketing book indicates the interest in neuromarketing. (I previously reported on the NBC Today Show coverage.) Here’s a sampling of opinions on Buyology: (more…)
Mon 27 Oct 2008
Those of us in the web marketing and search arena both love and fear Google. Google, directly or indirectly, makes us money and can send our sites millions of visitors; on the other hand, Google knows a LOT about us. Their Toolbar, Analytics, Adsense, Gmail, and, of course, Search are all happily gathering petabytes of data about our behavior. Now, Google is employing neuromarketing technology to peer inside our brains: (more…)
Thu 23 Oct 2008
One of the startling conclusions from the neuromarketing study described by Martin Lindstrom in Buyology is that not only are the government-mandated warnings on tobacco packages ineffective, but they actually promote smoking behavior by activating the brain’s nucleus accumbens, an area associated with cravings. This counterintuitive finding was a highlight of Lindstrom’s Today Show interview. In Lindstrom’s words,
We couldn’t help but conclude that those same cigarette warning labels intended to reduce smoking, curb cancer, and save lives had instead become a killer marketing tool for the tobacco industry.
While I have no doubt that the brain studies are accurate, I think the interpretation needs to be studied carefully. Before the mainstream media starts calling for a removal of these insidious warning labels, let’s look at what’s really going on… (more…)
Wed 22 Oct 2008
One of my most-read posts has been Reflecting on the Mirror, and both Neuromarketing readers and I have been, well, reflecting… (more…)
Tue 21 Oct 2008
Martin Lindstrom got a great plug for his new book, Buyology, in an interview on NBC’s Today Show. The piece may have been a bit superficial, and the host referred to fMRI when the particular study in question was performed using EEG caps, but overall I think the exposure for the concept of neuromarketing was positive. The word “Orwellian” wasn’t used once! (I suppose that might just reflect the more plebeian demographic of network TV viewers.) And, luckily for Lindstrom, the segment opened and closed with a nearly full-screen cover shot of the book, and the book’s title was superimposed on the screen for a good portion of the interview. Watch the whole piece: (more…)
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