Buyology - Martin Lindstrom [8]
The results of the additional brain scan studies I carried out were just as provocative, fascinating, and controversial as the cigarette research project. One by one, they brought me closer to a goal I’d set out to accomplish: to overturn some of the most long-held assumptions, myths, and beliefs about what kinds of advertising, branding, and packaging actually work to arouse our interest and encourage us to buy. If I could help uncover the subconscious forces that stimulate our interest and ultimately cause us to open our wallets, the brain-scan study would be the most important three years of my life.
BY WAY OF profession, I’m a global branding expert. That is, it’s been a lifelong mission (and passion) to figure out how consumers think, why they buy or don’t buy the products they do—and what marketers and advertisers can do to pump new life into products that are sick, stuck, stumbling, or just lousy to begin with.
If you look around, chances are pretty good you’ll find my branding fingerprints are all over your house or apartment, from those products under the kitchen sink, to the chocolate you stash in your desk drawer, to the phone beside your bed, to the shaving cream in your bathroom, to the car sitting in the driveway. Maybe I helped brand your TV’s remote control. The coffee you gulped down this morning. The bacon cheeseburger and French fries you ordered in last week. Your computer software. Your espresso machine. Your toothpaste. Your dandruff shampoo. Your lip balm. Your underwear. Over the years I’ve been doing this work, I’ve helped brand antiperspirant, feminine hygiene products, iPod speakers, beer, motorcycles, perfume, Saudi Arabian eggs—the list goes on and on. As a branding expert and brand futurist (meaning that the sum of my globe-hopping experience gives me a helicopter view of probable future consumer and advertising trends), businesses consider my colleagues and me something of a brand ambulance service, a crisis-intervention management team.
Let’s say that your line of pricey bottled water from the Silica-Filled-Crystal-Clear-Mountain-Streams-and-Artesian-Wells-of-Wherever is tanking. The company wants consumers to believe it’s bottled by elves standing ankle-deep in fjords rather than inside a sprawling plant off the New Jersey Turn-pike, but regardless, its market shares are tumbling, and no one in the company knows what to do. I’ll begin digging. What’s the secret of their product? What makes it stand out? Are there any stories or rituals or mysteries consumers associate with it? If not, can we root around and find some? Can the product somehow break through the two-dimensional barrier of advertising by appealing to senses the company hasn’t yet thought of? Smell, touch, sound? A gasp the cap makes when you unscrew it? A flirty pink straw? Is the advertising campaign edgy and funny and risk-taking, or is it as boring and forgettable as every other company’s?
Because I travel so much, I’m able to see how brands perform all over the world. I’m on an airplane about three hundred days out of the year, giving presentations, analyses, and speeches. If it’s Tuesday, I could be in Mumbai. The next day São Paolo. Or Dublin, Tokyo, Edinburgh, San Francisco, Athens, Lima, Sri Lanka, or Shanghai. But my hectic travel schedule is an advantage I can bring to a team that’s usually too busy to go outside their own building for lunch, much less visit a store in Rio de Janeiro or Amsterdam or Buenos Aires to observe their product in action.
I’ve been told more times than I can count that my appearance is as nonconventional as what I do for a living. At thirty-eight, I stand about five feet eight inches, and am blessed, or cursed, with an extremely young, boyish-looking