Buyology - Martin Lindstrom [58]
Fifteen years ago, when I was living in Copenhagen and working for an advertising agency, Luciano Pavarotti paid his first visit to Denmark. It was a huge deal, and the Danes were beside themselves. Everything was in place to celebrate his arrival—gala dinners, special broadcasts, interviews, and open-air broadcasts. But at the very last minute, the tenor canceled his performance, having come down with a sore throat. I don’t think I’ve ever witnessed a nationwide disappointment like that. I was worried the entire country would have to go on Prozac.
But it gave my advertising team and me an idea. In less than a few hours, we managed to convince a sore-throat lozenge manufacturer named GaJol to buy space in newspapers and magazines with a new tagline: If only Pavarotti had known about GaJol. It turned a nationwide disaster into a coup for the company. Even fifteen years later, many Danes associate GaJol lozenges with the beloved opera singer. Just goes to show that somatic markers are hard to erase.
Another time, when I was visiting Eastern Europe, I sat next to the CEO of one of the region’s largest banks. How, he asked me, could he boost his bank’s awareness? Now, I’d just polished off a large meal and a number of glasses of wine, and that probably contributed to my spontaneously advising him to paint his entire bank—and everything in it—pink. The fact that banks and pink don’t go together is exactly why I thought it would work. Six months later, he e-mailed me. He’d done as I’d said. Every branch, every car, every staff uniform, even his tie, was pink—but everyone hated it. What should he do? Stick with it, I said, and in three months you’ll notice a difference. Approximately ninety days later, he e-mailed me again. Now that customers had begun to associate the bank’s pink with the comfort and security of a childhood piggy bank, the bank had the highest brand awareness of any bank in the country and had cut their marketing costs in half.
SOME ADVERTISERS CREATE somatic markers in consumers’ minds using humor. In an ad for Lamisil, a pill used for foot infection, a yellow-bodied cartoon-like gremlin approaches a set of toes, lifts up one of the big toes and hops underneath, where he’s soon joined by his cronies—that is, until the owner of the foot pops a Lamisil. By anthropomorphizing germs in a humorous and memorable way this ad creates a powerful somatic marker that links the brand to powerful germ-fighting.4
Because somatic markers are based on past experiences of reward and punishment, fear too can create some of the most powerful somatic markers, and many advertisers are all too happy to take advantage of our stressed-out, insecure, increasingly vulnerable natures. Practically every brand category I can think of plays on fear, either directly or indirectly. We’re sold medicines to ward off depression, diet pills and gym memberships to prevent obesity, creams and ointments to quiet fears of aging, and even computer software to ward off the terror of our hard drives crashing. I predict that in the near future advertising will be based more and more on fear-driven somatic markers, as advertisers attempt to scare us into believing that not buying their product will make us feel less safe, less happy, less free, and less in control of our lives.
For a fear-driven somatic marker, it’s worth looking at Johnson’s No More Tears Baby Shampoo. What does it evoke? Fear of the same thing it promises to help you avoid: tears. Memories of stinging red eyes, from childhood onward. I got shampoo in my eyes recently, and guess what? It still hurts like hell, at any age. Similarly, I recently ran across an ad for Colgate toothpaste claiming that “emerging scientific research is associating serious gum disease with other diseases such as heart disease, diabetes and stroke.” In short, brush with Colgate—or else you’ll die!