Neuromarketing

   
Erotic images sell better than pictures of office supplies, and a lot better than photos of hairy spiders. Who knew? Actually, that’s a bit of an oversimplification. Stanford researchers led by neuroeconomics prof Brian Knutson have found that positive images, in this case mildly erotic photos of men and women shown to heterosexual men, stimulate the reward center in the brain and induce the viewers to take greater financial risks than subjects who saw neutral (office supplies) or negative (big spider) images. This effect was purely a priming effect, as all of the images were irrelevant to the subsequent decision. The implications of this work could be broad, impacting such diverse areas as gaming and auto sales. (more…)

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Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama is saddled with an unfortunate middle name, “Hussein.” Not only is it the name of one of the most brutal and belligerent dictators in the last century, it also has connotations that might suggest images of Islamic fanatics to a small subset of voters. When conservative radio talk show host Bill Cunningham used Obama’s middle name repeatedly in a warmup speech for Republican candidate John McCain, he was immediately criticized. McCain ended up apologizing for Cunningham’s remarks. All that was lacking was a statement like, “I will not make an issue of my opponent’s middle name!” Perhaps McCain shouldn’t rush to judgment on this - at least one study has shown that names DO seem to make a difference in behavior and outcomes. (more…)

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Brain studies are providing lots of new insights into consumer behavior, but this post recognizes a new and important role for marketing based on neuroscience research. If you are an occasional Neuromarketing reader (or grazer!), this is one post that you may want to bookmark.

Few advertising and marketing execs discount the value of marketing, but how often have you heard these kinds of statements?

• Our product will sell itself!
• Once people try the product, they’ll love it!
• We count on advertising mainly to build awareness.

Many business executives assume that marketing is a front-end activity designed to get people to buy the product at least once. At that point, the product itself takes over - the customer will like it, or not, and future purchases will depend on which it is. That’s true, as far as it goes, but it neglects an important fact: the customer’s real experience with the product will be shaped by his expectations and beliefs about the product. (more…)

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In our recent article on The Mating Mind, we described how “romantically primed” men were much more likely to spend lots of money than men who were not so primed, and than women in either condition. Separately, we’ve also noted that female salespeople seem to dominate some areas, and that these women seem to skew toward the attractive end of the spectrum. One example is the pharmaceutical sales rep, who prototypically is an attractive female who spends much of her time calling on a predominantly male physician customer base. That’s an overgeneralization, of course - there are lots of female docs, and lots of male drug reps. Still, the stereotype is sufficiently valid that a physician acquaintance of mine expressed mock shock at seeing a middle-aged male drug rep, quipping, “I don’t think I’ve seen one of those before.” (more…)

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The Mating Mind. A prof at the University of New Mexico has an interesting suggestion: the evolution of the human brain was largely driven by finding better ways to appeal to the opposite sex.

Geoffrey Miller is a man with a theory that, if true, will change the way people think about themselves. His idea is that the human brain is the anthropoid equivalent of the peacock’s tail. In other words, it is an organ designed to attract the opposite sex. Of course, brains have many other functions, and the human brain shares those with the brains of other animals. But Dr Miller, who works at the University of New Mexico, thinks that mental processes which are uniquely human, such as language and the ability to make complicated artefacts, evolved originally for sexual display…

In a paper he has just published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, in collaboration with Vladas Griskevicius of Arizona State University, Dr Miller [studied] two activities—conspicuous consumption and altruism towards strangers—to see if these support the “mating mind” hypothesis, as Dr Miller has dubbed his idea. Their conclusion is that they do. [From The Economist - Blatant benevolence and conspicuous consumption.]

In essence, they propose that altruism is a form of conspicuous consumption designed to enhance the reputation (and sex appeal, in the broadest sense) of the donor. Even though spendthrift behavior and charitable actions seem to be entirely unlike each other, in fact they may be different forms of the same behavior. The researchers tested their hypothesis by dividing subjects into two groups, and primed (see Priming) one with romantic ideas by having them write about their ideal date. The other group wrote about the weather. They then gave the subjects a fictional $5,000 to spend, and also asked them to allocate 60 hours of leisure time.

The results were just what the researchers hoped for. In the romantically primed group, the men went wild with the Monopoly money. Conversely, the women volunteered their lives away. Those women continued, however, to be skinflints, and the men remained callously indifferent to those less fortunate than themselves. Meanwhile, in the other group there was little inclination either to profligate spending or to good works. Based on this result, it looks as though the sexes do, indeed, have different strategies for showing off. Moreover, they do not waste their resources by behaving like that all the time. Only when it counts sexually are men profligate and women helpful.

That result was confirmed by the second experiment which, instead of looking at the amount of spending and volunteering, looked at how conspicuous it was. After all, there is little point in producing a costly signal if no one sees it.

As predicted, romantically primed men wanted to buy items that they could wear or drive, rather than things to be kept at home. Their motive, therefore, was not mere acquisitiveness. Similarly, romantically primed women volunteered for activities such as working in a shelter for the homeless, rather than spending an afternoon alone picking up rubbish in a park. For both sexes, however, those in an unromantic mood were indifferent to the public visibility of their choices.

These two studies support the idea, familiar from everyday life, that what women want in a partner is material support while men require self-sacrifice.

There’s useful information in this work for all kinds of marketers, both for-profit and nonprofit. Some of the conclusions may be fairly obvious. Long before neuromarketing and evolutionary psychology, marketers knew that men spend money to enhance their reputation (and their appeal to the opposite sex) - expensive sports cars, costly restaurants, and so on all demonstrate that the guy is financially well-fixed and hence attractive. Marketers who give a man a chance to buy something expensive in a visible way can expect an above-average rate of success. Nonprofits looking for donations must, to appeal to males, also ensure visibility - public recognition is particularly important among those who, even unconsciously, are seeking to boost their attractiveness.

The female side of the equation is a bit different. Women, apparently, tend not to spend money conspicuously as an implicit mating strategy. Interestingly, they may be induced to spend their time conspicuously for that purpose. Nonprofits looking for volunteers know that recognition is important, and this research underscores that some recognition should be public and visible to be most effective.

As always, there are a few caveats. These behaviors were most apparent when the subjects had been primed romantically - it would be a mistake to generalize these behaviors to all males and all females in every circumstance. It wouldn’t surprise me if there are age-based differences not uncovered in this research. And this work is bound to be controversial simply because it implies a selfish biological basis for altruistic behavior. When you suggest that both the male executive who writes a hefty check for cancer research or the Junior League member who spends hundreds of hours on fundraising for a new hospital wing are both being driven by a biological imperative, you are bound to catch some flak.

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We all know what the placebo effect is - give a group of patients a sugar pill instead of a medication with active ingredients, and some of them will show an improvement in their symptoms. Drug researchers treat the placebo effect as an annoying artifact that must be eliminated by using double-blind studies. Other health care advocates see it as remarkable evidence of human capacity for self-healing, and a topic that deserves extensive study. But what relevance does it have for marketers? New research shows that the placebo effect is related to the brain’s reward system, and it’s not a big leap to say that much of marketing is trying to achieve a non-medical placebo effect in the minds of customers.

First, the new research: a ScientificAmerican.com article by Nikhil Swaminathan, Expect the Best? Placebos Are for You! New study links expectations of rewards to placebo effect, describes a study performed by neuroscientist and radiologist Jon-Kar Zubieta and colleagues at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Subjects were first tested for their response to a placebo “painkiller” administered prior to a needle stick; as is typical, subjects exhibited different levels of pain relief from the bogus injection. On another day, they participated in a seemingly unrelated game of chance in which they were told they could win money.

Participants were told they could win or lose a certain amount of money each round; they would then push a button to determine the real take. Several of the participants showed a flurry of activity involving dopamine release in the nucleus accumbens while awaiting the outcome, indicating that they were expecting a reward. The people whose nucleus accumbens lit up during the game also reported greater relief from the sham painkillers. “What surprised me the most was the strong link between this element of reward processing and the fact that you can predict the placebo response,” Zubieta says. “The placebo effect is a resiliency mechanism in the brain. … You don’t [really] need the medication, you simply need to be convinced that something is going to work.”

This is significant news for medical researchers, who see new avenues of treatment being opened up. Long before neuromarketing became a buzzword, though, marketers have known about managing expectations. Simply put, marketers know that if they can create an expectation in the mind of their customer, and then not do anything to contradict that expectation, they have a good chance that the customer will find that expectation to be fully met. The “not contradicting” element is the key part of the process. Marketers try to create expectations with just about every customer contact. Often, though, those expectations are crushed, or at least strained, during the actual experience. It’s easy for a marketer to create an expectation of “fast, friendly service” - but if the customer has to wait in line to be served by a surly clerk, the expectation will fail to turn into the customer’s actual perception. Indeed, the dissonance between the promise and the reality may actually increase the customer’s perception of bad service.

But lots of expectations are a bit more nebulous - if a customer is expecting to be served coffee that is “aromatic, rich, and bursting with complex flavor… made using the finest coffee beans from the farthest corners of the globe, picked at the perfect moment, and roasted using a special process to lock in flavor and enhance the taste” and gets a cup that’s not half bad, he may attribute some of those superior characteristics to it. Like the placebo recipients, though, some customers are more likely to be influenced by the message than others. The same kinds of positive individuals who expect to win in a game of chance will probably experience the product as described by the message if there are no major disconnects between them.

Although the reports on the placebo study didn’t describe the personalities of the groups for which the placebo worked vs. those for which it didn’t, I’d assume that the latter group contained individuals more cynical in nature with generally pessimistic expectations. This would be the same type of person who, given a chance to wager a sum of money, would say, “I know I’m just going to lose…” These individuals are likely to cast a jaundiced eye at any marketing effort, assuming that the marketer is exaggerating if not being actually deceptive. (Maybe we’ll do a piece on “marketing to cynics” in the future.)

This concept differs from priming. Priming is more subtle than a placebo because it works entirely below the conscious level. By presenting the subject with non-obvious cues, the subsequent behavior of the subject is altered. In administering a placebo, an overt act is accompanied by a description of the expectated experience, e.g., pain relief, relaxation, etc.

To sum up, the key elements of placebo marketing are,

• Describe the positive experience the customer will have when she uses the product, visits the establishment, etc.
• Ensure that the actual experience doesn’t actually contradict the expectation you have established.
• Understand that some, but not all, customers will end up having the experience you described for them.

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“About 95% of all thought, emotion, and learning occur in the unconscious mind - that is, without our conscious awareness.”

       -Gerald Zaltman, in How Customers Think

This is a basic premise of almost everything we write about here at Neuromarketing - that customers generally can’t understand or explain why they make choices in the marketplace, and that efforts to tease out that information by asking them questions are doomed to failure. Furthermore, marketing efforts based mostly on customer statements and self-reports of their experiences, preferences, and intentions are likely equally doomed.

How Customers Think - Essential Insights into the Mind of the Market by Gerald Zaltman is a must read for anyone interested in neuromarketing. Zaltman is a Professor of Marketing at Harvard Business School and a Fellow at Harvard University’s Mind, Brain, Behavior Initiative. Subtitles are de rigeur for business books, and the cover of this one features an alternate tag line, “What Consumers Can’t Tell You and Competitors Don’t Know.” It was published in 2003, but has plenty of relevancy for today’s marketers.

How Customers Think may read more like a textbook than a business how-to book, but in many cases that turns into a strength. Virtually every statement is footnoted, which both adds credibility and provides a jumping-off point for further research on a particular topic. It’s a wide-ranging book, covering such diverse topics as priming, focus group failures, the fallibility of memory, branding, creativity, and much more. This diversity likely means that not all topics will interest every reader, but hard core marketers will find lots concepts to chew on.

Zaltman spends quite a bit of time on metaphors:

By inviting consumers to use metaphors as they talk about a product or service, researchers bring consumers’ unconscious thoughts and feelings to a level of awareness where both parties can explore them more openly together.

Zaltman believes that the words that people use when talking about a subject reveal as much as the content. He gives a variety of metaphorical speech in customer interviews. “Liquid” metaphors are identified by words like “spout, leak, poour, spit, brim over, dry up, in midstream,torrent, stream,” and others. In a study related to creativity in globally networked organizations, one CEO commented, “One breakthrough idea can be a tidal wave sending people scurrying to higher ground for protection… But people are just afraid to swim in moving waters, they prefer wading in a stagnant pool.” Zaltman thinks the language used better reflects subconscious thought than mere statements. He provides a “metaphor elicitation technique” to use in interviews. Such an interview might begin with showing the subject an ambiguous picture and asking how it relates to the topic being studied. Followup questions probe to elicit metaphorical speech and avoid directing the subject toward specific thoughts or goals.

Another technique described by Zaltman is “response latency.” By monitoring precisely how long it takes subjects to respond to a question (by pressing a key on a computer keyboard, for example) to pairings of words or images, true thoughts and feelings can be ascertained. In essence, the presence or absence of “noise” in the subjects’ thoughts is being measured. This type of study can help researchers probe implicit beliefs that exist outside conscious awareness. The book briefly touches on neuroimaging techniques like fMRI studies, but that area clearly isn’t Zaltman’s focus.

Memory and its fragility is the subject of an entire chapter. Zaltman shows how memory can be fallible, selective, conscious or unconscious, altered by subsequent information, influenced by mood, and in general a lot less reliable than most people think.

We’ll undoubtedly refer to How Customers Think from time to time in future posts - this is one reference we’ll keep handy.

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I recall the first mega-store that opened locally - it happened to be a Meijer store, though now Super Wal-Marts, Super Targets, and other stores that sell everything are common. It was interesting to watch what other shoppers had in their carts as they checked out - a gallon of milk, a floor mop, khaki slacks, and a chainsaw… one could start a creative writing contest in which entrants had to write a story based on shopping carts full of disparate items. As it turns out, there’s a downside to at least some of those weird product juxtapositions. New research shows that products that trigger subconscious feelings of disgust can “contaminate” consumer perceptions of other products.

Products like lard, feminine hygiene items, cigarettes, and cat litter trigger a disgust reaction, as do some less obvious items like mayonnaise and shortening. The research, conducted by Gavan Fitzsimons, a professor of marketing and psychology at Duke’s Fuqua School of Business, and Andrea Morales, an assistant professor of marketing at Arizona State’s W.P. Carey School of Business, was intended to explore how products like these affected consumer perceptions of other items in their shopping carts.

They performed a series of experiments in which participants observed food products placed close to or touching a distasteful product. In all cases, products that touched or rested against disgusting products became less appealing than products that were at least an inch away from the offending products. The effect was also enduring. Participants asked more than an hour after observing the products how much they wanted to try a cookie were less likely to want it if the package of cookies had been in contact with a package of feminine napkins.

The researchers say this behavior is not necessarily irrational, as it likely derives from basic instincts that caution humans against eating foods that have come in contact with insects or other sources of germs…

In one experiment, participants viewed packages of rice cakes — some wrapped in transparent packaging and some in opaque paper carrying a “rice cakes” label –that were touching a container of lard. The rice cakes in the clear packaging were later estimated to have a higher fat content than those in the opaque packaging. [From When Cookies Catch the Cooties.]

It’s interesting that packaging was shown to affect the degree of contagion, with products in clear packaging being the most vulnerable to subconscious contamination.

Clearly, marketers can’t control what shoppers combine in their shopping carts, and once the item is in the cart the consumer is almost certain to buy it anyway. It’s doubtful that this negative association is a long-lasting effect that would tarnish the brand or the consumer’s long term feelings about the product. I’d worry more about pre-shopping cart product contagion - i.e., on the store shelf, in displays, etc. Fortunately, most stores segregate their products by category, and one won’t find cat litter in the cookie aisle. Still, marketers should be aware of this previously unknown downside to clear packaging - while complete transparency assures consumers that the product they are buying is exactly what they expect, it seems that clear packaging subconsciously implies a degree of vulnerability. I’d speculate that in retail environments that aren’t well-lit and spotlessly clean, clear packages might allow the products to be “contaminated” (subconsciously, of course) by their surroundings.

These findings might also provide a minor boost for specialty retailers - products sold in a bakery, for example, may end up seeming more appealing to consumers that similar products sold in the bakery department of a megastore where the items will end up sharing cart space with “contagious” items. In the grand theme of neuromarketing, this new research seems to fit into the general area of priming, in which an individual’s subsequent perceptions or behavior have been influenced by seemingly innocuous stimuli.

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We’ve discussed priming - the idea that an attitude or concept can be activated in an individual by subtle cues without conscious awareness - multiple times (e.g., Priming by Order, Priming the Customer, Thinking about Money) and others). Now, researchers have found that something as subtle as a two-foot difference in ceiling height can alter the way the brain works.

“Priming means a concept gets activated in a person’s head,” researcher Joan Meyers-Levy told LiveScience. “When people are in a room with a high ceiling, they activate the idea of freedom. In a low-ceilinged room, they activate more constrained, confined concepts.” The concept of freedom promotes information processing that encourages greater variation in the kinds of thoughts one has, said Meyers-Levy, professor of marketing at the University of Minnesota. The concept of confinement promotes more detail-oriented processing.

The study consisted of three tests ranging from anagram puzzles to product evaluation. In every tested situation a 10-foot ceiling correlated with subject activity that the researchers interpreted as “freer, more abstract thinking,” whereas subjects in an 8-foot room were more likely to focus on specifics. [From Ceiling Height Alters How You Think.]

This study certainly triggers a whole cascade of individual questions - if a two-foot difference in ceiling height (that, in an office setting, few people would find noticeable enough to mention), what might the other architectural characteristics of the environment do? How might a soaring cathedral ceiling compare to either the eight or ten foot flat ceilings? How would a Frank Gehry structure composed of swooping curves compare to a rectilinear box? Would a windowless room, an office with a typical modest window, and one with floor-to-ceiling glass affect one’s thought process in a different manner? What about colors and textures? The number of variables is huge, and few have been studied.

For years, architects have boasted about the ability of their structures to spark creativity, enhance collaboration, and so on. While many probably dismissed these claims as mere puffery, now it seems that the research is beginning to make such claims more plausible. Back in 2005, we suggested that “neuroarchitecture” might be the next big buzzword. That didn’t prove to be the case, and we heard very little about the topic after that. These new findings may reignite interest in that topic.

Neuromarketing aside, retail marketers have long employed architectural priming techniques. Most of these have been fairly obvious - banks built substantial masonry buildings with classical pillars to connote timeless stability, expensive clothing retailers created store environments with high-concept designs and high quality flooring and fixtures, etc. Most of this work has been done intuitively - in the coming years, one might expect that store concepts will be tested and tweaked using the tools of neuroscience and psychology. Perhaps the day of the neuroarchitect has finally arrived.

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Exciting new research shows that subliminal messages do reach the brain, although their impact on behavior has yet to be demonstrated.

Scientists at the University College London (UCL) have found the first physiological evidence that invisible subliminal images do attract the brain’s attention on a subconscious level. The findings challenge previous scientific assumptions that consciousness and attention go hand-in-hand.

“What’s interesting here is that your brain does log things that you aren’t even aware of and can’t ever become aware of,” Bahador Bahrami from the UCL said. “We show that there is a brain response in the primary visual cortex to subliminal images that attract our attention without us having the impression of having seen anything. (From Subliminal messages ‘impact on brain’)

In one sense, this isn’t a huge surprise. Our past posts on priming, for example, show the impact of information that is assimilated unconsciously. And anyone who has read Malcom Gladwell’s Blink knows that the unconscious mind takes in a whole lot more than one might expect.

Still, it’s exciting to see proof that truly subliminal messages are processed by the brain. Certainly, it would be interesting to better understand the impact of these messages - would people actually act on a message to “Buy Coke”, for example? To some degree, this is of mostly academic interest. It’s hard to imagine regulatory bodies viewing insertion of subliminal messages as acceptable. Nevertheless, understanding how the brain handles subliminal messages will be of interest not only to neuromarketing devotees but the broader group of psychologists, neuroscientists, and marketers.

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