The Buying Brain: Secrets for Selling to the Subconscious Mind (46 page)

So, rather than depending on creative guessing or research techniques that do not reach below the surface of casual verbal observations, I hope you’ll use the principles in this book, based on the latest neuroscience findings, to hone in precisely on the real needs and wants of your consumers.

I believe that providing products and messages that leverage the emerging sciences of the brain will usher in a new era of partnership between marketers and consumers. That new day begins with messaging that’s aligned with consumers’ desires, with content that’s compelling, and with products, packages, and environments that know the brain inside and out and that acknowledge, respect, and reflect how our brains are built and how they work—all designed with people’s true but unarticulated desires and needs in mind.

The strategies outlined in this book succeed because they focus on what the brain
loves
and what it needs to make good choices and decisions—all presented in the most “brain-friendly” ways possible. We invite you to build upon these principles and examples to launch a
new era of creativity
in your 231

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The Buying Brain

own marketing and product development activities, with fresh, new insights drawn straight from neuromarketing’s proven best practices.

Recap

As I promised in the very first chapter, in this book we’ve learned how the buying brain functions; what’s attractive to it; how it decides what it likes and doesn’t like; and, ultimately, how it makes that all-important transition from being a “shopping brain” to becoming a “buying brain.”

As we saw when we journeyed back to a day in the life of our ancestors, our brains haven’t changed very much in 100,000 years, but the world around them has. That new combination—
the primal brain in the modern world
—creates huge challenges and opportunities; it has not existed in human history before.

Perfect Storm

In fact, the vast majority of what we know about the brain today has only been learned in the last few years. And, amazingly, what we know today is just the
tip of the iceberg.
We are at the crest of a huge wave of incipient knowledge. What we’re learning about the brain and our new ways of learning about it are growing beyond what we can imagine.

Sometimes, very rarely, as history moves us along, a confluence of events occurs, and new vistas appear. These are the horizons we see at the end of

“perfect storms,” crackling with clarity and tingling with the electricity of new ideas and methods for implementing them. For example, when astronomy and the ability to navigate by the stars coincided with our capability to build ships that could sustain life on the open sea for months at a time, the world changed from flat to round. When steam and electricity were harnessed and made available to the populace, our agrarian society formed cities and the Industrial Age was born. When Watson and Crick discovered the double helix in 1953, they set in motion a flood of new discoveries about the human genome that has revolutionized medicine and continues to this day. Concurrently, when 79 million Baby Boomers came of age together, they reinvented childhood, adolescence, and every other life stage they entered. Along the way, they stopped a war and changed the world.

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Vision of the Future

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Today, the ability to monitor
the full brain in real time,
combined with the computational capability to make sense of the results, applied to the needs for more effective and accountable marketing expertise, have launched us into our own perfect storm of consumer insights. As we look now into the bright blue sky that follows, here is a little taste of what we can expect—both in the world at large and in our (growing) corner of it.

The $1 Trillion Bargain

In the future, neuroscience insights will impact everything. Alarm clocks will wake us in concert with our REM sleep cycles. Exercise machines will coach and motivate us as we stride toward fitness. On the way to work, the car will monitor our moods, and provide us with music, information, or phone conversations depending on how we feel.

Entertainers will use neuroscience to create material that suits every taste.

Chefs will discover new and delightful ways to surprise our palates. Musicians will fine-tune melodies based on brain responses. Educators will create text-books and interactive materials that surprise and delight the learning brain.

Videogame designers will learn how to make games that adapt to the way
individual
brains play. Brain fitness will become as serious as physical fitness, and feeding the brain will be seen as just as important as providing good nutrition for the body.

Those manufacturers, advertisers, and retailers who take the time to know us at our deepest subconscious level will survive. Those who brandish buggy whips (or treat us like nameless statistics in a survey) will fall, swiftly, to the wayside.

Rather than resisting the inevitable and innovative, research teams will blend
cutting-edge neuroscience
into their product offerings. Traditional statistical methods like “conjoint analysis” will join hands with neuromarketing.

Market mix models will blend seamlessly with neuromarketing parameters and indices. Surveys will become much more reliable indicators of preferences and trends, blending verbal information with neural insights.

In fact, many of these inroads are already in the works. As you read these words, universities are beginning to introduce neuromarketing into their MBA programs and create a new generation of brain-based marketers. Ad agencies are hiring neuromarketers to augment their creative teams. Psychology departments are experiencing a boom in cognitive neuroscience enrollment.

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NeuroLabs are spreading around the world, becoming larger and studying more components of the corporate world. Neuromarketing has gone global, viral, and tribal—and its benefits extend to every corner of the globe.

Luckily for every brain who shares this gorgeous planet, the cumulative effect of the neuroscientific revolution extends far beyond who buys what product and why. It’s not hubris, but rational optimism, that leads me to believe that the advances we see today will make all of our lives a little bit better in the future, and some of our lives radically better than they can be today. For example, over the next few years expect neuroscience to provide much better therapies for the severely disabled, including: r Ways for “locked in” patients to communicate their thoughts and feelings by simply looking at a computer keyboard;

r Robotics that respond to minute brain signals from paralyzed patients, who will be able to navigate their worlds successfully for the first time; r Artificial retinas that work with signals from the optic nerves to restore sight to the blind;

r Ways to read nerve signals in patients with spinal cord injuries to help them control prosthetics to relearn how to walk, sit, stand, and
be
in the world; and

r New understanding and effective therapies for many disorders, including Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), Autism, Cerebral Palsy, Depression, Anxiety, Fibromyalgia, Neuropathic pain, Bipolar Disorder, Manias, Schizophrenia, and Sleep Disorders.

We can also look forward to:

r Mobile personal digital assistant (PDA) body scans to allow us to monitor our health and react to changes with remarkable, life-saving speed.

r Paradigm-shifting ways to educate our children—and our adults. Teaching methods that engage and delight the brain, that capture and use our twenty-first century knowledge of what works to create emotion, attention, and memory retention in the eager, learning brain.

r Architectural designs that encourage creative thinking and have a positive impact on the inhabitants’ cognitive, emotional, and physical health.

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I end with a quote from Bharata from 200 b.c. In the
Natya Shastra
, he says:
Where the hands go, the eyes have gone.

Where the eyes have gone, the mind has flown.

Where the mind has flown, there has gone emotion.

Where there is emotion, there goes life.

I think Bharata figured neuromarketing out long before I arrived on the scene.

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notes

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Notes and Sources

T hese notes provide guidance to the

reader looking for source references and additional reading opportunities on the topics covered in
The Buying Brain
. As I have written this book for readers who are not professional scientists, references to scientific source materials are kept to a minimum.

The vast difference in information processing capacity between the conscious and subconscious parts of our brains is documented in Timothy D. Wilson,
Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious
(Cambridge MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002), 24.

The basics of EEG data collection, including minimal standards for electrode counts and artifact collection, are covered in any neuroscience graduate program. An excellent source is Paul L. Nunez and Ramesh Srinivasan,
Electrical
Fields in the Brain: The Neurophysics of EEG
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). See also David Regan,
Human Brain Electrophysiology: Evoked Potentials
and Evoked Magnetic Fields in Science and Medicine
(New York: Elsevier, 1989).

“When asked how to recount how it reacted to something . . . the brain actually alters the original data it recorded.” For an excellent example of this phenomenon from the world of advertising, see Kathryn Braun et al., “Make My Memory: How Advertising Can Change Our Memories of the Past,”

Psychology and Marketing
19, no. 1 ( January 2002):1–23.

On sample sizes for EEG studies, the key is to calculate how many data points are required to achieve a statistically significant differentiation between expected effects. This is covered in most statistics texts. The classic reference is Jacob Cohen,
Statistical Power Analysis for the Behavioral Sciences
(New York: Academic Press, 2nd Edition, 1988).

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Notes and Sources

On the shortcomings of fMRI as a way to measure consumer responses, see the Mind Hacks blog post, “The fMRI Smackdown Cometh,”

June 26, 2008, and links at http://www.mindhacks.com/blog/2008/06/

the fmri smackdown c.html.

Strengths and limitations of biometric measures are covered in a huge literature. A good introduction is John L. Andreassi,
Psychophysiology: Human Behavior and Physiological Response
, 5th ed. (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2007).

“Our brain is the most metabolically expensive organ to operate . . .” See Este Armstrong, “Relative Brain Size and Metabolism in Mammals,”
Science
220, no. 4603 ( June 17, 1983), 1302–1304.

For evolution, altruism, kin selection, see Richard Dawkins,
The Selfish
Gene
. (Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1976).

Lee Alan Dugatkin,
The Altruism Equation.
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006).

On

deception,

see

“Deception

http://www.sunypress.edu/p-158-

deception.aspx” December 1985.

William A. Searcy and S. Nowicki.
The Evolution of Communication: Relia-bility and Deception in Signaling Systems
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).

For a discussion of the human “bottleneck” in evolution, see Richard Dawkins,
The Ancestor’s Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Life.
(Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 2004), 416.

For brain anatomy, see Malcolm Carpenter and Jerome Sutin,
Human Neu-roanatomy
, 7th ed. (London: Williams & Wilkins, 1976).

For a lush and beautiful overview of our five senses, see Diane Ackerman,
A Natural History of the Senses
(New York: Vintage, 1991).

For an overview of how the body “maps” sensory experiences, see Sandra Blakeslee and Matthew Blakeslee,
The Body Has a Mind of Its Own
(New York: Random House, 2007).

For the effects of physical appearance, see Ray Bull and Nichola Rumsey,
The Social Psychology of Facial Appearance
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Kate Lorenz, “Do Pretty People Earn More?” CNN.com, July 11, 2006; and Helene Cavior, Steven Hayes, and Norman Cavior, “Physical Attractiveness of Female Offenders,”
Criminal Justice and Behavior
1 (1974): 321–331.

The neurobiology of food cravings is explored in C.E. Fairburn and P.J.