Buyology - Martin Lindstrom [23]
As our SST study showed, for product placement to work, it has to be a lot slyer and more sophisticated than simply plunking a series of random products on a screen and expecting us to respond. Let’s revisit E.T. for a moment. Elliott didn’t just pop those Reese’s Pieces into his mouth during a thoughtless bike ride with his buddies; they were an essential part of the storyline because they were used to lure E.T. from the woods. To give another example, many of us who have seen Spielberg’s Minority Report still recall the witty 2054 animated edition of USA Today (with the headline “PreCrime Hunts Its Own,” accompanied by a photo of Tom Cruise’s head snapping from left to right) that a passenger was reading on a train during a crucial moment in the film. Yet we don’t remember the same newspaper when it made fleeting appearances in Black Hawk Down, Barbershop, and Maid in Manhattan. That’s also why in Casino Royale, the cameo shots of FedEx, Louis Vuitton, and other product placements were the equivalent of staring at the sky; like the Ford commercials, they had no relevance whatsoever to the plot.
What’s more, in order for product placements to work, the product has to make sense within the show’s narrative. So if a product isn’t a good match with the movie or TV show in which it appears—if the latest Bruce Willis shoot-’em-up movie has product placements, say, for cotton swabs, strawberry-flavored dental floss, or the Body Shop’s new scented lotion—viewers will tune it right out. But if the same movie features a scene of our hero at the gym mastering a new brand of exercise equipment or downing a Molson before he takes on two bullies in an alleyway single-handedly, viewers will respond more positively. Which is why, in the future, consumers are unlikely to see product placements for power saws, tractor-trailers, or Hummer RVs in the latest Reese Witherspoon film.
In other words, advertisers and marketers who blizzard us with brand after brand—a Mountain Dew and a Dell laptop here, a GNC super vitamin and a Posturepedic mattress there—might as well light a match to the millions of dollars they’ve spent on their ads. Unless the brand in question plays a fundamental part of the storyline, we won’t remember it, period. And therein lies Ford’s multimillion-dollar mistake.
But what exactly is it in our brains that makes some products so much more memorable and appealing than others? Well, we’re about to take a look at one of the most fascinating brain discoveries of recent times, one that plays an enormous role in why we’re attracted to the things we are. The place: Parma, Italy. The unwitting codiscoverers of this phenomenon? A species of monkey known as the macaque.
3
I’LL HAVE WHAT SHE’S HAVING
Mirror Neurons at Work
IN 2004, STEVE JOBS, CEO, chairman, and co-founder of Apple, was strolling along Madison Avenue in New York City when he noticed something strange, and gratifying. Hip white earphones (remember, back then most earphones came in basic boring black). Looping and snaking out of people’s ears, dangling down across their chests, peeking out of pockets and purses and backpacks. They were everywhere. “It was, like, on every block, there was someone with white headphones, and I thought, ‘Oh, my God, it’s starting to happen,’” Jobs, who’d recently launched his company’s immensely successful iPod, was quoted as saying.1
You could term the popularity of the iPod (and its ubiquitous, iconic white headphones) a fad. Some might even call it a revolution. But from a neuroscientific point of view, what Jobs was seeing was nothing less than the triumph of a region of our brains associated with something called the mirror neuron.
In 1992, an Italian scientist named Giacomo Rizzolatti and his research team in Parma, Italy, were studying the brains of a species of monkey—the macaque—in the hopes of finding out how the brain organizes motor behaviors. Specifically, they were looking at a region of the macaque brain known by neuroscientists as F5, or the premotor area, which registers activity