Neuromarketing

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…)

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Way back in 2005, in Can Caffeine Brain Boost Help Ad Recall?, I suggested that Starbucks could sell potent ads on their cups. This idea, though tongue-in-cheek in nature, was based on fMRI research that showed caffeine stimulated areas of the brain associated with memory:

Dr Florian Koppelstatter of the Medical University Innsbruck, Austria, found that caffeine affects distinct areas of the brain. This study is beleived to be the first to demonstrate a visible impact on the brain from caffeine. Subjects who had been given caffeine showed significantly more activity in the frontal lobe and the anterior cingulum - areas of the brain associated with memory and attention. Subjects who received a placebo showed no such impact.

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Does a better-smelling product work better? Probably not, but people will THINK it does. Research shows that people rated a better-smelling product higher in completely unrelated performance areas. Reading Whiff! The Revolution of Scent Communication in the Information Age by Brumfield, Goldney, and Gunning, I was led to The Smell Report, a white paper authored by Kate Fox and published by the Social Issues Research Centre. The paper cites two examples of consumer perceptions being influenced by scents: (more…)

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Book Review: Whiff! The Revolution of Scent Communication in the Information Age

C. Russell Brumfield, author of Whiff! The Revolution of Scent Communication in the Information Age, along with co-authors James Goldney and Stephanie Gunning, is bullish on scent. Whiff! is full of examples of how smells affect humans and how people have used aromas to accomplish business, personal, and other objectives. If there’s one theme that pervades the volume, though, it’s that whatever has been accomplished to date will pale by comparison with what the future holds. (more…)

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Mega-sporting events are always mega-advertising events, and the cost to become a sponsor or advertiser is a huge commitment of corporate dollars. The inevitable question that arises after the event is, “Was it worth it?” NeuroFocus, a neuromarketing research company, has released their “Beijing Brand Study” which attempts to answer that question for the 2008 Summer Olympics. One of the firm’s key measurement variables is “Brand Perception Lift,” which they define as “the degree to which certain specific brand attributes experience a gain in consumers’ subconscious associations with the brand.” (more…)

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Jim Edwards of Brandweek has penned an interesting and lengthy article describing his own experience as a neuromarketing subject, as well as providing some general background on the promise offered and challenges faced by the nascent science. In an interesting neurobranding test, Edwards had his brain scanned by Joy Hirsch, director of the Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Center at Columbia University, while viewing brands he liked and disliked. While one subject is hardly statistically significant, the results were intriguing. (more…)

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One of the interesting tricks our brains play on us is to transfer physiological and emotional states that we are experiencing to something else going on at the same time. In Sway, authors Ori Brafman and Rom Brafman describe one of the more unusual experiments in behavior I’ve seen. In fact, it sounds like the perfect research boondoggle, as it required traveling to a remote location of incredible natural beauty. Oh, and did I mention that an attractive female research assistant was part of the experiment?

Even if this road trip started off as a lark, the results it produced were quite interesting. Here’s the quick setup: the researchers traveled to Capilano Canyon in Vancouver, a scenic gorge that (at the time of the experiments) was conveniently traversed by two bridges: a sturdy and safe wooden one, and a scary, swaying rope bridge built in the 1800s and offering the possibility of falling up to 230 feet along its 450 foot length. (more…)

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In Decoy Marketing, I described my befuddlement when staring at a shelf full of shaving gel product variations. In that case, a jumbo-sized can at the same price as the regular-sized cans put an end to my indecision. It turns out I’m not the only marketer with an eye on the shaving gel shelf. In The Pitfalls of Megabranding - Consumers Don’t Necessarily Want More Choice, Ad Age’s Al Ries notes, “Edge shaving gel now comes in 13 different varieties, some of which have exceedingly long names like Edge Active Care Shave Gel Natural Cool, with Eucalyptus.”

A key conclusion of Ries’s post is that the proliferation of brand variants is leaving less shelf space for the best-selling original product, in turn leading to stockouts and lower sales, not to mention dilution of the original brand. Here’s a quick scorecard on how popular brands are exploding: (more…)

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Fantasizing about food and sex can reduce pain. (And you always thought those fantasies were a waste of time…) People in emotional or physical distress often turn to “comfort foods” - new research shows that just thinking about these foods can have a significant effect.

“Imagery tactics are the most potent cognitive behavior interventions for pain,” said Dr. Hamid Hekmat, professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point and lead author of the study. “We found that food fantasies such as imagining eating your favorite ice cream, chocolate cake or meal had a strong pain-attenuating effect. It enhanced mood, reduced anxiety, and helped coping with ice water pain.”

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It’s no news to regular Neuromarketing readers that people’s experience with products is heavily influenced by their expectations. Expensive wine tastes better than cheap wine, wine from California tastes better than wine from North Dakota, “powerful” pills relieve pain better than others, and so on… even when in all of these experiments there were no differences between the products. Apparently, this applies to software, too. Microsoft’s latest operating system, Vista, has suffered from bad press from the outset. Early users encountered bugs, corporate IT execs demanded that they be allowed to keep using Vista’s predecessor, Windows XP, and Apple heaped scorn on Vista with its PC Guy/Mac Guy ads.

Even after initial bugs were cured, opinions about Vista have still been negative compared to past OS introductions. This was no doubt annoying to Microsoft execs, just as if a North Dakota winery was shipping superb wine but found that people still found it less tasty than inferior wine from California. So, in a move out of the neuromarketing playbook (does Steve Ballmer read this blog?), Microsoft conducted a study that asked people to test-drive and rate a new operating system, “Mojave.” The new OS was, of course, actually Vista. (more…)

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