Buyology - Martin Lindstrom [81]
To figure out why her CD sales had fallen over the past two years, the management team behind a popular Latin American singer recently hired a well-known consulting company, MindCode, which specializes in the indirect signals that ads, brands, and personas send to our mammalian brains. In an effort to conquer the American market, the management team had altered the singer’s song lyrics to make them 100 percent English so as better to target U.S. listening tastes. Yet could this possibly be the reason for the unexpected slump in the singer’s career? MindCode’s careful analysis said it was, and advised the singer’s management team to reintroduce Spanish lyrics into her songs (or at least, mix them up judiciously with English lyrics), which she did. A few months later, the singer’s CD sales had rebounded spectacularly.
Microsoft and the personal computer are getting into the act, too, finally acknowledging that “human beings are often poor reporters of their own actions,” according to a company spokesperson.2 Which is why the company plans to use EEGs to record the electrical activity in people’s brains to see what emotions—from surprise to satisfaction to incredible, hair-pulling frustration (a feeling not unfamiliar to most Microsoft users)—people felt as they interacted with their computers.
Unilever, the international giant that manufactures everything from Pond’s Cold Cream to Lipton Tea, recently teamed up with a brain-scanning company to find out how consumers truly felt about its best-selling Eskimo ice cream bars. And what did they discover? It wasn’t just that consumers liked their particular brand of ice cream; eating ice cream, it turns out, creates even greater visceral pleasure for us than either chocolate or yogurt.
Neuroscientists have even studied how our brains make decisions about how much we’re willing to pay for a product. When subjects view luxury products such as Louis Vuitton and Gucci being sold at full price, both the nucleus accumbens and the anterior cingulate light up, showing the pleasure of anticipatory reward mixed with the conflict about buying such an expensive doodad. But when consumers are shown the same products priced at a significant discount, the “conflict” signal decreases as the reward activation simultaneously goes up.
In a related study, researchers from Stanford University and the California Institute of Technology asked twenty volunteers to rank their enjoyment of differently priced wines under an fMRI. The trick: two of the wines were presented twice, one with an expensive price tag, the other normally priced. The findings? When the expensive wine was presented, there was a flurry of activity in subjects’ medial orbitofrontal cortices, where they perceive pleasantness—indicating that the higher price of a product enhances our enjoyment of it. As Antonio Rangel, an associate professor of economics at Cal Tech, concluded, “we enjoy our purchases…because we paid more.”3
Yet few neuromarketing studies could be more intriguing than one carried out in early 2007 by a team of researchers at UCLA. Using an fMRI, they scanned the brains of ten people—five men and five women—as they reviewed last year’s Super Bowl commercials. A high-stakes experiment to say the least, considering that in 2006 the price for a thirty-second Super Bowl ad reached a new high: $2.4 million for a single spot, the most expensive in TV history.
One ad, created by car giant General Motors, trumpeted the automaker’s 100,000-mile warranty. It opens with a shot of a robot working at an automotive assembly line. All is business as usual until the robot fumbles a screw and the assembly line comes to a stop. In short order, the robot is out of a job, homeless, despondent, and reduced to begging on the sidewalks, until finally, he ends his life by hurling himself off a bridge. In the last few seconds,