Buyology - Martin Lindstrom [59]
Or what about attention deficit disorder, and the litany of negative, even catastrophic associations it carries? Fifteen years ago, it barely existed, but today it’s being diagnosed left, right, and sideways. I’m not suggesting that some kids don’t have it, or can’t benefit from treatment, but ADD (and the fear of our children being diagnosed with it) has saturated our culture like a virus. And the result, of course, is millions of parents buying their children drugs. A parent’s internal monologue may go something like this: If my child doesn’t take Ritalin or Adderal or Concerta, he won’t be able to concentrate in school. He’ll fall behind. His grades will suffer. He’ll be marginalized by his peers. He’ll begin hanging out with other low-performing kids. He won’t get into college. He’ll drift from job to job. He may even end up in jail. All because I didn’t address his ADD when he was in kindergarten. Fear, in my experience, spreads faster than anything else—and the ads for those drugs have done a very nice job scaring the pants off us.
Of course, not all somatic markers are based on pain and fear. Some of the most effective ones are rooted in sensory experiences, which in fact can often be quite pleasant. So in the next part of our study, we’re going to take on the power of the senses in our everyday buying decisions. In a revolutionary experiment, we’ll put somatic markers under an fMRI—and show how one of the most famous sounds in the world can completely destroy an otherwise beloved brand.
8
A SENSE OF WONDER
Selling to Our Senses
LET’S TAKE A STROLL around Times Square. We’ll pretend we’re tourists, necks craned, eyes drawn irresistibly upward as we ogle the oversized billboards that seem to block out every piece of sky. Red neon news and business tickertapes wrapping around the buildings, twenty-foot-high billboards of men in underwear, women in pink lingerie, oversized bottles of perfume and tequila and diamond-encrusted wristwatches for the well-heeled modern man and woman. Not to mention the phantasmagoric blur of logos, everything from Virgin Records to Starbucks to Skechers to Maxell to Yahoo!. And the same visual assault is taking place in downtown Tokyo, London, Hong Kong, and every other commercial mecca across the world. But what if I told you that much of this visual, in-your-face advertising is, on the part of advertisers, a largely wasted effort? That, in fact, our visual sense is far from our most powerful in seducing our interest and getting us to buy. What if I could prove to you that when working alone, our eyes—the same ones sneaking a glance at that Nordic god in his skivvies, that petulant beauty in her bikini bottom, that decanter of Chanel, those flashing letters spelling out Swatch, JVC, Planet Hollywood, AT&T, Chase Manhattan, McDonald’s, Taco Bell, T-Mobile, and so on—are in fact much less potent than we have long believed?
Today, we are more visually overstimulated than ever before. And in fact, studies have shown that the more stimulated we are, the harder it is to capture our attention.
A brain-scanning company called Neuroco has carried out a study for 20th Century Fox that measured subjects’ electrical brain activity and eye movement in response to commercials placed inside a video game. During a virtual stroll through Paris, volunteers viewed ads on billboards, bus stop shelters, and the sides of buses to see which best got their attention. The results: none of them. The researchers found that all the visual saturation resulted only in glazed eyes, not higher sales.
I’m not denying that sight is a crucial factor in why we buy. But as our two upcoming tests would show, sight in many cases isn’t as powerful as we first assumed—and smell and sound are substantially more potent than anyone had ever dreamed of. In fact, in a wide range of categories (not just the obvious, like food), sound and smell can be even stronger than sight. And this was the impetus that lay behind the experiment Dr. Calvert and I carried out—the first-ever full-scale study of its kind—to test the enormous