Do we remember the movie ‘Minority Report’ of Tom Cruise where a special police department known as ‘Pre-Crime’ tracked down criminals before they did crimes based on the knowledge provided by psychics? Yes, that day is here. Since the past few months, many questions have arisen in my mind. As marketeers, can we predict who all are going to purchase my brand? Who will be my future customer? In which geographical location are my future customers? Can I precognize the extent of the possibility of a particular sale's closing? What is that one thing that is needed in order to bring our brand into limelight? What would be the perfect timing and the ways of presentation, not from our perspective but from our target customer's perspective? What needs to be done to make people feel more comfortable in using our brand? From their perspective, what will be the key benefits to our consumers when purchasing our brand? What logical support do we need to provide them to buy our brand? How can we physically engage our consumers beyond communication so that they understand the extent that our product will make their life better? What are the key emotions and feelings that needs to be generated? What brand associations do we need to change or reinforce? Questions are endless.
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As
days passed, my burning desire to find satisfactory answers to these questions
kept increasing and I realized that all our market research is basically based
on the externals while having zilch information of the actual consumer's
specific subconscious mind. What is going on in the mind of the specific
consumer? In which direction is his subliminal thoughts flowing? What are his
limiting believes? What are the specific motivating factors in his deep within?
From his friends, from the marketing of our competitors, from his own research
and through other sources what are the past influences he has had regarding our
product? What does he actually want that will satisfy his specific needs? All
these information is already there within his subconscious mind, precognizing
which, will help the marketeer to custom mold his presentation to help the
client commit his decision. As such this "commitment" to go for or
not to go for, is made within the customer's mind much ahead of the purchasing
moment. Precognizing that info is of vital clue. From the toothpaste one uses
in the morning to the last supper of the day, everything is decided by one's
subconscious mind. Precognize it and you have the key.
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| A similar cap worn used by those taking part in the Neuro Experiments |
Looking back in 2008, when
John-Dylan Haynes from the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain
Sciences in Leipzig, Germany, demonstrated through his experiment that it is
possible to predict our decisions about seven seconds before the subjects had
consciously made the decisions. According to him, many processes in the brain
occur automatically and without involvement of our consciousness. This prevents
our mind from being overloaded by simple routine tasks. But when it comes to
decision making, we tend to assume they are made by our conscious mind. But is
it really so? At that moment when I read the research report, I felt “Huh! How
is this possible?” But now as I think, I can confidently say, “Neuro Marketing
is the next big thing that is going to change our industry.” Now, the question
is what is neuro marketing? Though it may sound like a jargon but in reality
the definition is very simple. To summarize, Neuro marketing is a science which
helps us to understand the genuine need of the buyer and predict his
behavioural pattern. It may be a product, it may be an advertisement, it may be
a song, it may be a movie, and by practicing neuro marketing we can bring an
impact into each and every concerned activity that is happening around us.
Trust me by not knowing what is neuro marketing, we have already practiced it
so many times earlier in our life. Can we spot the
arrow between the logo of Fedex which we have seen so many times in our daily
life.? Look, how brilliantly they have portrayed their brand message of
forwardness through their logo which directly hits our unconscious mind even
without knowing it. That’s the magic of Neuro Marketing.
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| The logo of FedEx |
As I am writing this, one of my friends called me up. He asked me to send some documents for doing a research for launching a product. But here I strongly differ to his opinion. If we fail to analyze the preferences or our own behaviour, research is meaningless. When a reporter asked Steve Jobs how much market research is there behind launching the iPad, he said “None, It is not the consumers’ job to know what they want.” The iPad would become the most successful consumer product introduction according to some measures, and Apple the most valuable company of all-time.
Let us start with a game. Sit in a chair and try to draw clockwise 8 with your dominant leg in the air and also perform the same action with your hand. In most of the cases, it has been seen that while hand effortlessly completes the job, the leg is frozen midway or in reverse directions. Why this is happening? When we are using our hands it’s an unconscious activity, we have done this so many times earlier, to be specific, we are in autopilot mode but doing it with legs is a conscious activity where efforts in needed. Brands are nothing but learned behaviours, unconscious automatic intelligence acquired through experience. They simplify our lives by generating choices and action without requiring us to think. Let us look into some case studies and find out what are the ways involved to move ahead in neuro marketing.
What we do is because of what we
feel. We assign value to things through our emotions. Because of the way our
brains are wired, emotions influence our thinking more than our thinking
influences our emotions. Emotions are also the basis in which powerful memories
are formed. And brands are essentially memories or expectations of outcomes
based upon past experiences. Do we remember the little boy in the Times of
India “I Lead” Campaign ad who is trying to remove the tree trunk from the road
so that the traffic can move freely? This ad simply gave a stroke at our
emotional chord by influencing our thinking pattern. It has a “feel good”
factor in it.
The result: The advertisement become most popular of all the time and reached a view of 11 millions in YouTube.
Consciousness gives us the exclusive ability to rationally reject an idea if it does not make sense based upon our experiences. Often, in order to act, we need to give ourselves logical permission to voluntarily submit to the emotions and impulses that drive us. I still remember the lines of the Cadbury Dairy Milk Ad “Kuch Khaas hain hum sabhi mein.” If we look at the lines, they are so simple but how strong the message is which it portrays. It gives a chance to everyone to relate their life’s different incidents with the commercial and make everyone to think. “Hey don’t look behind? Even you have something in yourself which makes you special.”
The result: With about above 10
million views in YouTube, the ad became the most favourite ad of the century
according to a report which even today everyone remembers.
Our minds and our memories work by
association. Repetition and emotion strengthen these neural associations so
that they become automatic. If we want to change perceptions of anything, we
have to change our associations. If we look at the “Kuch Meetha Ho jaye”
campaign that Cadbury has been doing since a long time, we will understand how
associations can change our thinking. The brilliant advertisement which
enforces the message of replacing Cadbury as a sweet is indeed a great example
to look out for.
The result: The ad got 20 million views in YouTube and sales
of Cadbury increased.
The mind is what the brain does, it
is the brain in action, and it works through a process of pattern recognition.
If we want to get attention and shift people’s behavioural patterns, we need to
interrupt their perceptual patterns by doing something interesting and different.
Do we remember the Volkswagen
advertisement "The Force’ in which the mini Darth Vader was trying to show
his powers on his family and failing constantly until he tried it with the car
which got started as his father pressed the remote? The moment this action took
place, it interrupted our conventional pattern of thinking. According to the
man behind this advertising Doug Pran Vaet of Deutsch LA, the ad scored the
highest ‘neuro engagement’ score ever.
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| The Force Volkswagen Advertisement for the new Passat |
The result: ‘The Force’ generated 55
million views in you tube with 6.8 billion impressions and the brand won the
best car advertisement of the year award with the highest market share record
in the past thirty years with two gold at Cannes.
Oppa Gangam Style! We all are
familiar with the line. Right? Marcelo Peruzzo who decided to do an experiment
with 20 men and 20 women and note down their reactions. They used eye tracking
to monitor the eye movements, galvanic skin response to measure the muscular
excitement level and facial coding to understand the emotions of those persons
watching the video. Using facial recognition software, it was seen that most
viewers experienced happiness, sadness and surprise while watching the video,
while disgust, fear and anger were insignificant proving the attraction of the
video.
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| Different movements noticed while doing the research |
The result: It became the most
popular video in the world with a view of more than 10 billion.
Humans gravitate to the known, the safe, and
the trusted. Although we are attracted to what is different, we move toward the
familiar seeking balance, and rely on predictable patterns not just in our
biology but also in our environments. Many brands have tried to portray that we
are the safest by using brand ambassadors who shares the same brand value with
the company. Do we remember the incident when Cadbury was facing the insect
problem how they used Amitabh Bacchan to claim that their product was safe? Recently,
I talked with one of my friends who work in Southwest Airlines at America. To
his company, employees come first rather than the consumers. The rationale is
pretty simple. ‘If we treat our employees’ right, they will treat our
consumers’ right. We treat our employees like family and our consumers are
guests in our home’ he added.
The result: Southwest Airlines was
the largest airline in the world based on the number of passengers that fly the
airline each year, and it was not only America’s leading low-cost carrier but
was also rated America’s favourite airline by Consumer Reports.
Even
Hollywood is using neuro marketing. Using the results, they found they could
predict box office hits. According to Fast Company magazine, ‘If a film’s
trailer fails to reach a specific emotional engagement threshold (65), it will
very likely generate less than $10 million in revenue on opening weekend.” But
a film whose trailer exceeds an engagement threshold of 80 “will very likely earn
more than $20 million the first weekend”. Studios such as Fox and Paramount
have now started taking neuro marketing very seriously.
According to Steve Sands from El Paso, Texas, who has been spent 20 years of his life in using technologies to look inside our head and show what consumer’s feel, as opposed to what the marketers think we feel. Using EEG tests (essentially a plastic swimming cap complete with electrodes to measure brain signals), functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI, which measures brain activity by looking at changes in blood flow), and eye-tracking Neuro Marketing as it is known, has completely revolutionized the worlds of Advertising and Marketing. Sands Research also tests ads before they’ve aired, letting agencies know what works and what doesn’t. According to him, ‘By looking at the EEG readout we can tell whether they’re disengaged or engaged. And we’ve found that storyline wins every time. If you want to lose someone’s attention, have several storylines in your commercial.’
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| The EEG Shopper |
It has taken 20 big years to realize
how effective neuro marketing can be. From the day when British psychologist,
Dr David Lewis-Hodgson, founded one of the earliest firms, Mindlab International,
in the UK in 1988 to 2013 when the research agency Millward Brown announced
that its clients Unilever and Coca-Cola will use facial coding technology where
emotions can be tracked through facial expressions, what a wonderful glory it
has been for the entire world of advertising and marketing. It is high time for
us to understand the importance of Neuro Marketing and do a proper
implementation of the strategies before spending thousands of rupees in
advertising and marketing your product.
Now, The choice is yours. Four More Shots Please!
