The Buying Brain: Secrets for Selling to the Subconscious Mind (39 page)

The future of shopping will hold even more delights for consumers, and more potential rewards for marketers, as retailers gain a deeper understanding of the brain, how it interacts with the store environment, and how to leverage that knowledge to create a more effective shopping experience.

Takeaways:

1.
The brain avoids sharp corners. Let’s face it, how many 90-degree angles do you see in nature?

2.
The brain approaches the store the same way it approached the Serengeti: in hunting, gathering mode. It’s a serious task.

3.
Humans engage with the shopping experience in seven dimensions: information, environment, entertainment, education, simplicity, self-worth/social worth, and community. These are all critical for a superior shopping experience.

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Advertising

At the end of this chapter, you’ll know and be able to use the
following:

r Specific neurological best practices to enhance the effectiveness of advertising messages

r Four key neuroscientific principles that form the basis for the most effective advertising

r The importance of priming

Advertising Effectiveness Framework

Measuring the brain’s responses to advertising is valuable to agencies and clients in several ways. The 10 elements of the Advertising Effectiveness Framework enable analyses that are
unique and beyond
what conventional audience research methodologies can deliver. These elements are:
1. Second-by-Second A-E-M Response:
The core NeuroMetrics of Attention, Emotion, and Memory are gathered for every second of a commercial. This helps
diagnose effective or ineffective segments
of the spot and aids in understanding which elements are lacking. These deep diagnostics into which of the core elements of the ad are contributing or lacking—the attentional component, the emotional component, or the memorability—are very useful in improving the content and implementing best practices. These diagnostics are not available through any other testing methodology.

Assessing the effectiveness of the ad in the first five seconds helps us determine whether the ad runs the risk of viewer flight or tune-out.

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Similarly, the way the spot ends is important, because brand logos and product messaging are placed near or at the end. Endings that are weak neurologically lessen the memorability of those brand logos, taglines, and value propositions.

Second-by-second response measurements enable precise identification of the high points and lulls of emotional engagement. We have found that ads that have lulls (low points of neurological effectiveness) in excess of four seconds suffer risk of viewer flight. Careful analysis of thousands of effective and ineffective ads has revealed that there are natural rhythms of neurological effectiveness in successful ads. Comparing typical profiles of effective ads to any ad identifies areas for, and potential degrees of, improvement. Note that these techniques do not favor any one kind of creative approach or another, but merely point out that there are natural rhythms for effective ads that a good agency or brand team can leverage. Aggregating the second-by-second scores into measures of Attention, Emotional Engagement, Memory Retention, and Overall Effectiveness helps us compare one version of an ad to another along multiple dimensions.

2. Deep Subconscious Response:
We gather the unarticulated Deep Subconscious Response to the core creative brief, the brand image, price points, and other attributes and components of an ad. This neurological measurement gets at the implicit emotional and memory priming the ad evokes. The paradigms for this testing use implicit testing methods to gather neurological signatures in time intervals of
300 milliseconds
or less
.

An ad serves a number of purposes. In addition to conveying product and brand attributes that are meant to motivate a consumer to purchase, the ad conveys targeted messaging of a more general nature. Those messages may not be registered consciously or explicitly recalled by the subject, but they may (or may not) be registered by the subconscious.

It is critical to know which messages have been received by the subconscious mind of the consumer, and which have not. Using the Deep Subconscious Response method provides a marker for what has been logged and tagged in the consumer’s mind. We find it useful to measure the Deep Subconscious Response to the Brand Essence prior to having test subjects watch the ad, and then perform the Brand Essence test again after this viewing to determine what has changed. This reveals which of the brand elements have resonated from the ad.

3. Wear-In and Wear-Out:
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effectiveness of the ad remains unchanged or increases (Wear-In), or decreases (Wear-Out). Wear-In and Wear-Out metrics help an advertiser
optimize media buys
through managing reach (recommended for higher Wear-Out ads) and frequency (recommended for higher Wear-In ads). Since media buying is usually the most expensive component of the advertising budget, this particular metric can be of significant value to advertisers.

We have found that effective ads with a sharp Wear-Out profile, meaning high levels of effectiveness that drop sharply with repeat viewings, lend themselves to being virally spread through the Internet rather than through reach-based gross rating points (GRPs) on television.

4. Neurological Compression:
Our proprietary neurological compression software automatically picks out the most neurologically salient seconds of an ad, and performs smoothing around these sequences to produce a compressed and neurologically optimized version of the ad.

Our algorithms produce an
8- to 10-second version
of a 30-second spot. This optimized rendering enables advertisers to adapt expensive commercial productions for efficient and effective use in alternative video platforms, such as the Internet and mobile communications, where shorter lengths are required for viewership. Our observation, gained from many instances of creating neurologically compressed ads, is that effective commercials still tell a cogent and complete story when they are reduced from their original lengths.

We have also created Purchase Intent-based compression, where the moments of maximal Purchase Intent are used to define the compression.

We have found that ads compressed using the Purchase Intent NeuroMetric tend to be well suited for display on TV screens in store aisles and at points of purchase. Similarly, we have found that the compression of ads using novelty creates treatments that are most effective on mobile phones and the Internet. These key neurological metrics provide significantly different lenses that enable us to create nuanced compressed versions of ads that are suited for different market purposes.

5. Parietal (Taste/Touch/Smell) Brain Stimulation:
We directly monitor stimulation of the brain areas responsible for taste/touch/smell as the ad evolves, and when actual product consumption is featured. We have found that in effective ads, the ad does not just tell a story, but the imagery and story actually stimulate the areas of the brain corresponding to the core features of the product being enjoyed. This index of direct brain stimulation is valuable, especially for food and beverage makers.

We have found it to be a powerful way to navigate between the need P1: OTA/XYZ

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to tell a compelling story and the need to showcase the features of the product that stimulate a direct brain response.

6. Reach Propensity, Immediate Consumption, and Mirror Neuron System Activation:
While the neurological mechanisms behind the Mirror Neuron system are very complex and represent the current frontiers of neuroscience, this system has immediate applications in the world of marketing and advertising. (See Chapter 9 for a description of Mirror Neurons.) If the ad shows the product
in the act of being
handled or consumed
, we look to Mirror Neuron activation to see whether the consumer’s brain activates a mirror response to what it sees on the screen.

We have found interesting correlations between this Mirror Neuron activity and the desire for immediate consumption of the product, or the propensity to reach for the product. This metric reveals the extent to which an ad invites and stimulates the viewer to handle or consume the product immediately. A problem that vexes manufacturers and advertisers is that sometimes consumers buy a product, put it away, and never use or consume it. Determining the extent to which a consumer is motivated to practice consumption of the product while watching the ad could become an important metric for evaluating the effectiveness of the ad.

7. Neurological Iconic Signature (NIS) Embedding:
Neurological Iconic Signatures are the unique moments in the product consumption experience that generate the highest levels of brain engagement. NIS

responses are identified through Total Consumer Experience (TCE) testing, and can then be applied to verify how well the “face and voice”

of the product are embedded through the length of a commercial. We identify overt embedding of the NIS, as well as the implicit embedding of the NIS through the entirety of the ad. We have found that ads that embed the NIS score higher across most dimensions, and
generate
significantly higher Purchase Intent
. There are many nuanced and subtle methods of embedding the visual and audio elements of the NIS.

We measure the effectiveness of each to calculate the overall weight of NIS activations in the ad. As mentioned, we have found that ads containing implicit and explicit activations of the NIS score higher on overall Effectiveness, and generate significantly greater Purchase Intent than ads that do not embed the NIS.

8. Audio Coherence and Music/Voice Effectiveness:
Because we measure activity across the entire brain, we are able to measure the separate and combined effectiveness of music and narrative in an ad.

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Music provides emotional context to advertising, and the brain uses context to interpret and understand the meaning and message of an ad.

Music and voice are powerful factors in advertising Effectiveness, yet are poorly measured by conventional techniques. Our full brain processing algorithms tackle this task efficiently, and we generate critical metrics that indicate the level of emotion generated by music and voice in a spot. This capability is also very useful in identifying the optimal music and voice fit among competing choices at any stage along the ad production process, including preproduction and animatics. In addition, by analyzing the overall Effectiveness of the ad in conjunction with different music treatments, we can diagnose and identify whether any problematic sequence in the ad can be fixed by music alone, rather than requiring more expensive and time-consuming fine-tuning and modification.

9. Character/Spokesperson Effectiveness:
Through intelligent blending of eye-tracking and brainwave data, we are able to isolate the effectiveness of a character or a spokesperson in an individual ad or for full campaigns. Through application of both the Deep Subconscious Response technique and our character coding metrics, we are able to isolate successful characters as well as ineffective characters, and
diagnose the
underlying dynamics
of each. This is useful for determining whether a character in an ad—for example, a person, an animal, or a cartoon character—has enough deep neurological impact to justify creating an entire portfolio of ads featuring this character. We have found that when a character contributes strongly to ad effectiveness, exposing the character in additional ads can create a portfolio win, such as that achieved for the Aflac duck or the Verizon “Can you hear me now?” guy.

10. Out-of-Home (OOH) and In-Store Advertising NeuroMetrics:
We are able to isolate components of an ad that are particularly suitable for display and viewing in-store, as well as on billboards and other OOH venues. These are moments in the ad that generate the greatest Purchase Intent and Novelty. The display of static or dynamic versions of the ad using the Purchase Intent metric have been found to result in
significant increases in sales
. Isolating moments of an ad that generate significant Purchase Intent can produce immediate economic value by helping to differentiate your product from the clutter of competitors on the shelf.

The best neuromarketing is based on the best neuroscience.
So it won’t surprise you to learn that the most effective advertising is also based solidly on P1: OTA/XYZ

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the best neuroscientific principles, as outlined in the Advertising Effectiveness Framework.

Of course, what I just said may come as a complete surprise to many of you. Science? Applied to the creative heart of advertising? I can just hear the dismay arising spontaneously at advertising agencies—and perhaps from some clients as well. But the fact is, as you have read or will read throughout this book, the brain does have specific preferences. It has things it likes and doesn’t like; there are things it looks for and things it dismisses. These are sometimes quite distinct—we know, because we encounter and measure them daily.