Buyology - Martin Lindstrom [57]
For years, Andrex has used its puppy mascot to advertise how “soft, strong, and very long” its toilet paper is. In a series of commercials, the puppy is seen skidding down a snowy hill on a sheet of toilet paper; in another, a woman holds the puppy while behind them a long lacy banner of Andrex toilet paper billows and flutters behind a speeding car. At first, the connection between puppies and toilet paper seems obscure, kind of random. But as Heath writes, “Puppies are linked with growing young families; puppies are even linked to toilet training. The connections between any of these concepts and the puppy associations can be created and reinforced every time the ads are seen.” Heath adds, “When faced with the need to buy toilet paper, the average consumer will not stop and try to recall the ads to mind. However, when they tap into their intuitive feelings about the two brands, the likelihood is that they will come up with a far richer set of conceptual links for Andrex than for Kleenex…All they might do is ‘feel’ that Andrex is somehow indefinably ‘better’ than Kleenex.”2
For advertisers, it’s easy and inexpensive to create a somatic marker in consumers’ brains. Let’s take an example from real life. How do you know to look both ways when you cross the street? Chances are you once had a close call that came as a shock—and that shock has stuck with you ever since. Since somatic markers are typically associations between two incompatible elements—in this case, an uneventful morning and a sudden screech of brakes—they are far more memorable, and lasting, than other associations we form throughout our lives. Which is why, in attempting to hook our attention, advertisers aim to create surprising, even shocking associations between two wildly disparate things.
Take a guy by the name of Tom Dickson. Tom Dickson resembles any midwestern, middle-aged suburban dad. But this suburban dad has a rather out-of-the-ordinary job. He sells blenders. But that’s not what’s most bizarre about him. To advertise the blenders, he has created a series of short videos, available on the Blendtec Blender Web site (which have migrated virally over to YouTube), which open with the question “Will it blend?”—a concept likely borrowed from Dan Aykroyd’s famous Saturday Night Live skit, in which he used a blender to pulverize a sea bass. As viewers look on saucer-eyed, Tom Dickson proceeds to grind, chop, mash, mince, puree, and annihilate a series of objects inside his kitchen blender. Bic lighters. A tiki torch. A length of garden hose. Three hockey pucks. Even an Apple iPhone. Every week, Tom Dickson makes it his mission to pulverize something new and seemingly unpulverizable.
Watching an iPhone whirl and clack until it’s been reduced to a smoking mass of black particles is, to say the least, un-forgettable. It creates a somatic marker so dramatic in our brains that the next time we’re whipping up a strawberry smoothie, we can’t help but think: wouldn’t the Blendtec Blender do a better job? Our brains associate the brand of blender with the memorable image of an iPhone being ground into a steaming pile of dust, and without even consciously realizing it, we’ve picked up the Blendtec box.3
Sony created an ingenious somatic marker in the weeks before the release of Spiderman 3, using men’s rooms in selected theaters. A guy would stroll in and see a conventional line of urinals and stalls. Nothing out of the ordinary. That is, until he would happen to gaze upward and see a single standalone plastic urinal seven feet above his head. Next to it: the words Spiderman 3…Coming Soon. Pretty memorable, huh?
And remember the Energizer Bunny? “Nothing outlasts the Energizer. He keeps going and going and going…” A stuffed pink creature