Buyology by Martin Lindstrom - Excerpt

buy OLOGYt r u t h a n dl i e s a b o u t w h y w e buy

m a r t i nlindstrom

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Copyright 2008, 2010 by Martin Lindstrom

All rights reserved.Published in the United States by Broadway Books, an imprint of theCrown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.www.crownpublishing.com

BROADWAY BOOKS and the Broadway Books colophon aretrademarks of Random House, Inc.

Originally published in hardcover in slightly different form in theUnited States by Doubleday, an imprint of the Knopf DoubledayPublishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2008.

All trademarks are property of their respective companies.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataLindstrom, Martin, 1970

Buyology : truth and lies about why we buy / by Martin Lindstrom.p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.(hc : alk. paper) 1. Neuromarketing. 2. Consumer behavior.

3. ShoppingPsychological aspects. 4. MarketingPsychologicalaspects. I. Title.

HF5415.12615.L56 2008658.8'34dc22

2008006057

ISBN 978-0-385-52389-9

P R I N T E D I N T H E U N I T E D S TAT E S O F A M E R I C A

Design by Terry Karydes

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

First Paperback Edition

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c o n t e n t s

foreword by paco underhill v i i

introduction 1

1:a rush of blood to the headT h e L a r g e s t N e u r o m a r k e t i n g

S t u d y E v e r C o n d u c t e d 7

2:this must be the placeP r o d u c t P l a c e m e n t ,

A m e r i c a n I d o l , a n d Fo r d s M u l t i m i l l i o n - D o l l a r M i s t a k e 3 7

3:i ll have what shes havingM i r r o r N e u r o n s a t Wo r k 5 3

4:i cant see clearly nowS u b l i m i n a l M e s s a g i n g ,

A l i v e a n d We l l 6 8

5:do you believe in magic?R i t u a l , S u p e r s t i t i o n ,a n d W h y We B u y 8 8

6:i say a little prayerFa i t h , R e l i g i o n , a n d B r a n d s 1 0 7

7:why did i choose you?T h e Po w e r o f S o m a t i c M a r k e r s 1 2 8

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8:a sense of wonderS e l l i n g t o O u r S e n s e s 1 4 1

9:and the answer is . . .N e u r o m a r k e t i n g a n d

P r e d i c t i n g t h e Fu t u r e 1 6 6

10:lets spend the night togetherS e x i n A d v e r t i s i n g 1 7 7

11:brand new dayT h e Fu t u r e o f M a r k e t i n g

a n d A d v e r t i s i n g 1 9 4

12:conclusionG o o d T i m e s , B a d T i m e s 2 0 6

appendix 2 1 9

acknowledgments 2 2 3

notes 2 2 9

bibliography 2 3 9

index 2 4 5

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vii

f o r e w o r d

pa c o u n d e r h i l l

It was a brisk September night. I was unprepared for theweather that day, wearing only a tan cashmere sweater under-neath my sports jacket. I was still cold from the walk from myhotel to the pier as I boarded the crowded cruise ship onwhich I was going to meet Martin Lindstrom for the first time.He had spoken that day at a food service conference held bythe Gottlieb Duttweiler Institute, the venerable Swiss thinktank, and David Bosshart, the conference organizer, was eagerfor us to meet. I had never heard of Martin before. We movedin different circles. However, I had seen BRANDchild, Mar-tins latest book, in the JFK airport bookstore before I flewinto Zurich.

Anyone seeing Martin from twenty feet away might mis-take him for someones fourteen-year-old son, being draggedreluctantly to meeting after meeting with his fathers over-weight graying business associates. The second impression isthat somehow this slight blond creature has just stepped intothe spotlightyou wait for the light to fade, but it doesnt.

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Like a Pre- Raphaelite painting there is a glow that emanatesfrom Martin as if he was destined to be on stage. No, not as amatinee idol, but as some god waif. The man exudes virtue.Close up, he is even more startling. Ive never met anyone withsuch wise eyes set in such a youthful face. The touch of grayand the slightly crooked teeth give him a unique visual signa-ture. If he werent a business and branding guru, you mightask him for an autographed picture or offer him a sweater.

I dont think we exchanged more than ten words that nightseven years ago. But it was the start of a personal and profes-sional friendship that has stretched across five continents.From Sydney to Copenhagen, from Tokyo to New York, weconspire to make our paths cross. Laughter, discussion, mu-tual councilit has been a unique pleasure. Martin spendsthree hundred nights a year on the road. I dont have it thatbad, but after a certain point you stop counting the strange pil-lows and discarded flight coupons and just enter into the com-radeship of road warriors.

Martin watches, listens, and processes. The bio on his Website says he started his advertising career at age twelve. I findthat less interesting than the fact that at about the same age hisparents pulled him out of school, hopped on a sailboat andwent around the world. I know that at age twelve I couldnthave lived on a ten- meter boat for two years with my parents.Martin says he still gets seasick and chooses to live in Sydney,which is about as far away from his native Denmark as you canget.

In the world of learned discourse what is fun is findingyourself sharing opinions with people whose pathway to thatpoint of view has been different from yours. Its both a formof validation and a reality check. In my career as an anthro-

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b u y o l o g y ix

pologist of shopping, I havent always seen eye to eye with ad-vertisers and marketers. For one, I have a fundamental distrustof the twentieth- century fascination with branding; I dontown shirts with alligators or polo players on them and I rip thelabels off the outside of my jeans. In fact, I think companiesshould pay me for the privilege of putting their logo on mychest, not the other way around. So its a bit strange for me tofind myself in the same pulpit with someone who is passion-ate about branding and believes that advertising is actually avirtuous endeavor, not just a necessary evil. What we share isthe belief that the tools for understanding why we do what wedo, whether its in shops, hotels, airports, or online, need to bereinvented.

Through the end of the twentieth century merchants andmarketers had two ways of examining the efficacy of their ef-forts. First was tracking sales. What are people buying andwhat can we ascertain from their purchase patterns? I call itthe view from the cash register. The problem is that it vali-dates your victories and losses without really explaining whytheyre happening. So they bought Jif peanut butter, eventhough Skippy was on sale.

The second tool was the traditional market researchprocess of asking questions. We can stop people as they strolldown the concourse of the mall, we can call them up on thephone, we can invite them to a focus group or ask them to joinan Internet panel. I know from long experience that what peo-ple say they do and what they actually do are different. It doesnot mean that those two tools are not functional, just that theyare limited. Just as advertising and branding still workbutthey dont work the same way they used to.

The problem was that we are better at collecting data than

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doing anything with it. In the nineties the offices of manymarket researchers were stacked with printouts, whether ontelevision ratings and viewing, scanner data from sales re-search, or the results of thousands of phone interviews. Welearned that soccer moms between the ages of 28 and 32,driving late model minivans and living in small towns, preferJif two to one over Skippy. What do we do with the informa-tion? As one cynical friend suggested, we are looking to getbeyond the so what, big deal, and what-can-I-do-with-this information test.

Science and marketing have historically had a love-hate re-lationship. In the 1950s academicians ventured out of theirivory towers and began collaborating with advertising agen-cies. Vance Packards seminal book The Hidden Persuaders de-scribes that golden era that lasted less than a decade. Makingmoms feel good about feeding their children Jell-O, or decon-structing why a sexy sports car in the front of the Ford deal-ership sold Plain Jane sedans off the back lot. Much of it wassimple and logical. Applying it was easy with three major tele-vision channels and roughly a dozen popular magazines. Therelationship started unraveling when stuff just went wrong. Inthe fifties, in spite of the best brains and a very healthy mar-keting budget, the Edsel flopped. Thirty years later New Coketanked.

For the past three decades the science in market researchwas more about higher math than psychology. Statistical rele-vance, sample size, standard deviation, Z-tests and T-tests andso on. The absolutes of math are somehow safer. I like tothink that the modern market researcher is in the business ofmaking his clients better gamblers by seeking to cut the odds.Call it a cross between scientist and crystal ball reader: some-

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one fast enough to get it right and with enough gift of gab totell a believable story.

In this volume, Martin, who has spent the past ten yearsdeveloping new research tools, steps off into neuromarketing.This book is about the new confluence of medical knowledgeand technology and marketing, where we add the ability toscan the brain as a way of understanding brain stimulations.What part of the brain reacts to the Coca-Cola logo? How dowe understand what part of sex sells?

I guarantee you, its an enjoyable and informative ride.From fishing villages in Japan to locked corporate board-rooms in Paris to a medical laboratory in Oxford, England,Martin has a treasure chest of fascinating insights to impartand stories to tell. And whatever your feelings about brandsand brandingor whether you have any feelings on the sub-ject at allhell keep you wanting more.

Will we be able to watch sexual stimulus migrate to differ-ent parts of the brain as procreation and pleasure get furtherunhooked? Stand back, Michael Crichtonthis isnt the sci-ence fiction of time machines or nano- technology run amok.It is Martin Lindstrom and hes got another great book.

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buyOLOGY

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i n t r o d u c t i o n

Lets face it, were all consumers. Whether were buying a cellphone, a Swiss antiwrinkle cream, or a Coca-Cola, shopping isa huge part of our everyday lives. Which is why, each andevery day, all of us are bombarded with dozens, if not hun-dreds, of messages from marketers and advertisers. TV com-mercials. Highway billboards. Internet banner ads. Strip mallstorefronts. Brands and information about brands are comingat us constantly, in full speed and from all directions. With allthe endless advertising were exposed to every day, how canwe be expected to remember any of it? What determineswhich information makes it into our consciousness, and whatends up in our brains industrial dump of instantly forgettableHuggies ads and other equally unmemorable encounters ofthe consumer kind?

Here, I cant help but be reminded of one of my numeroushotel visits. When I walk into a hotel room in a strange city, Iimmediately toss my room key or card somewhere, and a mil-lisecond later Ive forgotten where I put it. The data just van-

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ishes from my brains hard drive. Why? Because, whether Imaware of it or not, my brain is simultaneously processing allother kinds of informationwhat city and time zone Im in,how long until my next appointment, when I last ate some-thingand with the limited capacity of our short-term mem-ories, the location of my room key just doesnt make the cut.

Point is, our brains are constantly busy collecting and fil-tering information. Some bits of information will make it intolong-term storagein other words, memorybut most willbecome extraneous clutter, dispensed into oblivion. The pro -cess is unconscious and instantaneous, but it is going on everysecond of every minute of every day.

The question is one Ive been asked over and over again:Why did I bother to write a book about neuromarketing? Af-ter all, I run several businesses, I constantly fly all over theglobe advising top executivesheck, Im home only sixtydays out of the year. So why did I take time out of my alreadytime-starved schedule to launch the most extensive study ofits kind ever conducted? Because, in my work advising com-panies on how to build better and lasting brands, Id discov-ered that most brands out there today are the productequivalent of room keys. I realized that, to clumsily para-phrase my countryman Hamlet, something was rotten in thestate of advertising. Too many products were tripping up,floundering, or barely even making it out of the starting gate.Traditional research methods werent working. As a brandingadvisor, this nagged at me to the point of obsession. I wantedto find out why consumers were drawn to a particular brandof clothing, a certain make of car, or a particular type of shav-ing cream, shampoo, or chocolate bar. The answer lay, I real-ized, somewhere in the brain. And I believed that if I could

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uncover it, it would not only help sculpt the future of adver-tising, it would also revolutionize the way all of us think andbehave as consumers.

Yet heres the irony: as consumers, we cant ask ourselvesthese questions, because most of the time, we dont know theanswers. If you asked me whether I placed my room key onthe bed, the sideboard, in the bathroom, or underneath theTV remote control, consciously, at least, I wouldnt have thefoggiest idea. Same goes for why I bought that iPod Nano, aCasio watch, a Starbucks Chai Latte, or a pair of Diesel jeans.No idea. I just did.

But if marketers could uncover what is going on in ourbrains that makes us choose one brand over anotherwhatinformation passes through our brains filter and what infor-mation doesntwell that would be key to truly buildingbrands of the future. Which is why I embarked on what wouldturn out to be a three-year-long, multimillion- dollar journeyinto the worlds of consumers, brands, and science.

As youll read, I soon came to see that neuromarketing,an intriguing marriage of marketing and science, was the win-dow into the human mind that weve long been waiting for,that neuromarketing is the key to unlocking what I call ourBuyologythe subconscious thoughts, feelings, and desiresthat drive the purchasing decisions we make each and everyday of our lives.

Ill admit, the notion of a science that can peer into the hu-man mind gives a lot of people the willies. When most of ushear brain scan, our imaginations slither into paranoia. Itfeels like the ultimate intrusion, a giant and sinister PeepingTom, a pair of X-ray glasses peering into our innermostthoughts and feelings.

b u y o l o g y 3



An organization known as Commercial Alert, which haspetitioned Congress to put an end to neuromarketing, claimsthat brain- scanning exists to subjugate the mind and use itfor commercial gain. What happens, the organization askedonce in a letter to Emory University president James Wagner(Emorys neuroscience wing has been termed the epicenterof the neuromarketing world), if a neuroscientist whos anexpert in addiction uses his knowledge to induce productcravings through the use of product- related schemes? Couldit even, the organization asks in a petition sent to the U.S. Sen-ate, be used as political propaganda potentially leading tonew totalitarian regimes, civil strife, wars, genocide and count-less deaths?1

While I have enormous respect for Commercial Alert andits opinions, I strongly believe they are unjustified. Of course,as with any newborn technology, neuromarketing brings withit the potential for abuse, and with this comes an ethical re-sponsibility. I take this responsibility extremely seriously, be-cause at the end of the day, Im a consumer, too, and the lastthing Id want to do is help companies manipulate us or con-trol our minds.

But I dont believe neuromarketing is the insidious instru-ment of corrupt governments or crooked advertisers. I be-lieve it is simply a tool, like a hammer. Yesin the wronghands a hammer can be used to bludgeon someone over thehead, but that is not its purpose, and it doesnt mean that ham-mers should be banned, or seized, or embargoed. The same istrue for neuromarketing. It is simply an instrument used tohelp us decode what we as consumers are already thinkingabout when were confronted with a product or a brandandsometimes even to help us uncover the underhanded methods




marketers use to seduce and betray us without our even know-ing it. It isnt my intention to help companies use brain- scanning to control consumers minds, or to turn us intorobots. Sometime, in the faraway distant future, there may bepeople who use this tool in the wrong way. But my hope is thehuge majority will wield this same instrument for good: to better understand ourselvesour wants, our drives, and our motivationsand use that knowledge for benevolent, andpractical, purposes. (And if you ask me, theyd be fools not to.)

My belief? That by better understanding our own seem-ingly irrational behaviorwhether its why we buy a designershirt or how we assess a job candidatewe actually gain morecontrol, not less. Because the more we know about why we fallprey to the tricks and tactics of advertisers, the better we candefend ourselves against them. And the more companiesknow about our subconscious needs and desires, the moreuseful, meaningful products they will bring to the market. Af-ter all, dont marketers want to provide products that we fall inlove with? Stuff that engages us emotionally, and that en-hances our lives? Seen in this light, brain- scanning, used ethi-cally, will end up benefiting us all. Imagine more products thatearn more money and satisfy consumers at the same time.Thats a nice combo.

Until today, the only way companies have been able to un-derstand what consumers want has been by observing or ask-ing them directly. Not anymore. Imagine neuromarketing asone of the three overlapping circles of a Venn diagram. In-vented in 1881, the Venn diagram was the creation of oneJohn Venn, an English logician and philosopher from a no- nonsense Evangelical family. Typically used in a branch ofmathematics known as set theory, the Venn diagram shows all

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the possible relationships among various different sets of ab-stract objects. In other words, if one of the circles repre-sented, say, men, while the other represented dark hair, andthe third, mustaches, the overlapping region in the centerwould represent dark-haired men with mustaches.

But if you think of two circles in a Venn diagram as repre-senting the two branches of traditional marketing researchquantitative and qualitativeits time to make room for thenew kid on the block: neuromarketing. And in that overlappingregion of these three circles lies the future of marketing: thekey to truly and completely understanding the thoughts, feel-ings, motivations, needs, and desires of consumers, of all of us.

Of course, neuromarketing isnt the answer to everything.As a young science, its limited by our still- incomplete under-standing of the human brain. But the good news is that understanding of how our unconscious minds drive our be-havior is increasing; today, some of the top researchers aroundthe globe are making major inroads into this fascinating sci-ence. At the end of the day, I see this bookbased on thelargest neuromarketing study of its kindas my own contri-bution to this growing body of knowledge. (Some of my find-ings may be questioned, and I welcome what I believe willresult in an important dialogue). Though nothing in sciencecan ever be considered the final word, I believe Buyology is thebeginning of a radical and intriguing exploration of why webuy. A contribution that, if Ive achieved my goal, overturnsmany of the myths, assumptions, and beliefs that all of us havelong held about what piques our interest in a product and whatdrives us away. So I hope you enjoy it, learn from it, and comeaway from it with a better understanding of our Buyologythe multitude of subconscious forces that motivate us to buy.




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