Buyology - Martin Lindstrom [11]
By uncovering the brain’s deepest secrets, I wasn’t interested in helping companies manipulate consumers—far from it. I buy a lot of stuff, too, after all, and at the end of the day, I’m as susceptible to products and brands as anyone. I also want to sleep well at night, knowing I’ve done the right thing (over the years I’ve turned down projects that, in my opinion, crossed that line). By attempting to shine a spotlight on the buying behavior of over two thousand study subjects, I felt I could help uncover our minds’ truest motivations—and just maybe push human brain science forward at the same time.
It was time to throw everything up in the air, see where it landed, then start all over again. Which is where our brain-scanning study came in.
FOR ME, IT all began with a Forbes magazine cover story, “In Search of the Buy Button,” which I picked up during a typical daylong airplane flight. The article chronicled the goings-on in a small lab in Greenwich, England, where a market researcher had joined forces with a cognitive neuroscientist to peer inside the brains of eight young women as they watched a TV show interspersed with half-a-dozen or so commercials for products ranging from Kit Kat chocolates, to Smirnoff vodka, to Volkswagen’s Passat.
Using a technique known as SST, which measures electrical activity inside the brain (and resembles, I later found out, a floppy black Roaring Twenties–era bathing cap), the scientist and researcher had focused on a sequence of wiry lines crawling across a computer, like two garter snakes engaged in a mating dance. Only these weren’t snakes, but brain waves, which SST was measuring millisecond-by-millisecond, in real time, as the volunteers viewed the commercials. An abrupt spike in one woman’s left prefrontal cortex might indicate to researchers that she found Kit Kats appealing or appetizing. A sharp drop later on, and the neurologist might infer the last thing in the world she wanted was a Smirnoff-on-the-rocks.6
Brain waves as calibrated by SST are straight shooters. They don’t waver, hold back, equivocate, cave in to peer pressure, conceal their vanity, or say what they think the person across the table wants to hear. No: like fMRI, SST was the final word on the human mind. You couldn’t get any more cutting-edge than this. In other words, neuroimaging could uncover truths that a half-century of market research, focus groups, and opinion polling couldn’t come close to accomplishing.
I was so excited by what I was reading I nearly rang the call button just so I could tell the steward.
As I mentioned earlier, eight out of every ten products launched in the United States are destined to fail. In 2005, more than 156,000 new products debuted in stores globally, the equivalent of one new product release every three minutes.7 Globally, according to the IXP Marketing Group, roughly 21,000 new brands are introduced worldwide per year, yet history tells us that all but a few of them have vanished from the shelf a year later.8 In consumer products alone, 52 percent of all new brands, and 75 percent of individual products, fail.9 Pretty terrible numbers. Neuroimaging, I realized, could zero in on those with the highest chance of succeeding by pinpointing consumers’ reward centers and revealing which marketing or advertising efforts were most stimulating, appealing, or memorable, and which ones were dull, off-putting, anxiety-provoking, or worst of all, forgettable.
Market research wasn’t going away, but it was about to take a seat at the neuroscience table and in the process, take on a brainy new look.
IN 1975, WATERGATE was still scandalizing America. Margaret Thatcher was elected the leader of the conservative party in Great Britain. Color TV debuted in Australia. Bruce Springsteen