Buyology - Martin Lindstrom [80]
Why? Because whether it succeeds in getting us to buy or not, sex is perhaps more accessible today than it’s ever been. Young consumers no longer have to steal their father’s dirty magazine, or sneak into a triple-X-rated movie—now, every kind of sex imaginable is only a mouse click away. And because we’re so overexposed to images of sex, in coming years advertisers will be forced to fight for our attention by upping the ante with more and more overt sexuality. We’ve seen it all and done it all—so the shock effect has faded. But I predict this will ultimately backfire; a decade from now, most of us will have become so desensitized to sex in advertising we won’t even notice it anymore.
And advertisers will backtrack—and start all over again.
In other words, eventually I believe sex in advertising will go underground. Sexual ads in the future will get sneakier, subtler. They’ll suggest, but they won’t complete. They’ll flirt, but take it no further than that. They’ll propose, then leave the rest up to our imaginations. In short, you could say that the future of sex in ads will be to kick-start a journey into our own heads.
Now it’s time to let your brain take over.
11
CONCLUSION
Brand New Day
IN THIS BOOK, YOU’VE witnessed an historic meeting between science and marketing. A union of apparent opposites that, I hope, has shed new light on how you make decisions about what you buy—everything from food, to cell phones, to cigarettes, even to political candidates—and why. Now you and your brain have a better understanding of what is behind this advertising assault that plays on our hidden preferences, unconscious desires, and irrational dreams, and that exerts such an outsized influence on our behavior, each and every day. Thanks to neuroimaging, we can now understand better what really drives our behavior, our opinions, our preference for Corona over Budweiser, iPods over Zunes, or McDonald’s over Wendy’s.
It’s bizarre, when you think about it, how long it’s taken for science and marketing to come together. After all, science has been around for as long as there’ve been human beings puzzling over why we behave the way we do. And marketing, a twentieth-century invention, has been asking the same sorts of questions for over a hundred years. Science is hard fact, the final word. Marketers and advertisers, on the other hand, have spent over a century throwing spaghetti at the wall and hoping it will stick.
The fact is that most marketing, advertising, and branding strategies are a guessing game—and those ads that happen to meet success are considered, in hindsight, pure kismet. Until now, marketers and advertisers haven’t really known what drives our behavior, so they’ve had to rely on luck, coincidence, chance, or repeating the same old tricks all over again. But now that we know that roughly 90 percent of our consumer buying behavior is unconscious, the time has come for a paradigm shift. Earlier, I compared advertisers to Christopher Columbus gripping a simple, scribbled map of an earth he believed to be flat. Thanks to brain-scanning experiments, we’re now seeing an almost Aristotelian shift in thinking; companies are starting to realize that the world, in fact, is round. No more sailing and tacking and falling off the edge of the world and into the abyss. There is much to be learned from the science of neuromarketing. Let me give you a few examples.
Among the companies taking advantage of neuromarketing is Christian Dior, which put its new fragrance, J’adore, to the fMRI test, assessing