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By Root 364 0

they are. Some, like the tobacco companies, are scarily smart. But most still can’t answer a basic question: What drives us, as consumers, to make the choices we do? What causes us to choose one brand or product over another? What are shoppers really thinking? And since no one can come up with a decent answer to these questions, companies plow ahead using the same strategies and techniques as they always have. Marketers, for example, are still doing the same old stuff: quantitative research, which involves surveying lots and lots of volunteers about an idea, a concept, a product, or even a kind of packaging—followed by qualitative research, which turns a more intense spotlight on smaller focus groups handpicked from the same population. In 2005, corporations spent more than $7.3 billion on market research in the United States alone. In 2007, that figure rose to $12 billion. And that doesn’t even include the additional expenses involved in marketing an actual product—the packaging and displays, TV commercials, online banner ads, celebrity endorsements, and billboards—which carry a $117 billion annual price tag in America alone.

But if those strategies still work, then why do eight out of ten new product launches fail within the first three months? (In Japan, product launches fail a miserable 9.7 times out of every ten.) What we know now, and what you’ll read about in the pages that follow, is that what people say on surveys and in focus groups does not reliably affect how they behave—far from it. Let’s take an example. Today’s modern mother is more and more fearful about “germs,” “safety,” and “health.” No woman in her right mind wants to accidentally ingest E. coli, or pick up strep throat, nor does she want little Ethan or Sophie to get infected either. So a company’s research department develops a small vial of something antibacterial—we’ll call it “Pure-Al”—that women can tuck in their pockets, and whip out to slather on their hands after a day spent in a suffocating office, a friend’s filthy apartment or an overcrowded subway car.

But can Pure-Al really inhibit our fears about “germs” and “safety”? How can its marketers know what these terms mean to most of us? Sure, there’s a basic human desire to feel safe and secure, as well as a natural aversion to germ-ridden banisters, bacteria-laden jungle gyms, and dusty offices. But as our smokers’ questionnaires showed, we don’t always express or act on these feelings consciously; there’s an entire peninsula of thought and feeling that remains out of reach. The same goes for every single other emotion we experience, whether it’s love, empathy, jealousy, anger, revulsion, and so on.

Tiny, barely perceptible factors can slant focus group responses. Maybe one woman felt that as a mother of four kids and three dogs and seventeen geckos, she should care more about germs, but didn’t want to admit to the other women in the room that her house was already messy beyond the pale. Or maybe the head of the research team reminded another woman of an ex-boyfriend who left her for her best friend and this (okay, just maybe) tainted her impression of the product.

Maybe they just all hated his nose.

Point is, try putting these micro-emotions into words or writing them down in a roomful of strangers. It can’t be done. That’s why the true reactions and emotions we as consumers experience are more likely to be found in the brain, in the nanosecond lapse before thinking is translated into words. So, if marketers want the naked truth—the truth, unplugged and uncensored, about what causes us to buy—they have to interview our brains.

All of this is why, in 2003, I became convinced that something was fundamentally wrong with the ways companies reached out to customers, to us. Quite simply, companies didn’t seem to understand consumers. Companies couldn’t find and develop brands that matched our needs. Nor were they sure how to communicate in a way so that their products gripped our minds and hearts. Whether they were marketing cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, fast-food, cars, or pickles, no advertisers