The Branded Mind

What Neuroscience Really Tells Us About the Puzzle of the Brain and the Brand

Erik Du Plessis

• Publisher: Kogan Page
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780749462987
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Betriebswirtschaft
• Subtopic: Werbung

The Branded Mind is about how people think, and particularly how people think about brands. It explores what we know about the structure of the brain, how the different parts of the brain interact, and then demonstrates how this relates to current marketing theories on consumer behaviour.

Investigating developments in neuroscience and neuromarketing, and how brain science can contribute to marketing and brand building strategies, The Branded Mind is based on exclusive research by Millward Brown, one of the World's top market research companies. This unique and insightful book covers everything from the nature of feelings, emotions and moods, to consumer behaviour, decision making and market segmentation, and how to use these insights to the benefit of your brand.

PART ONE What it is all about

Introduction

Brain science has undergone a revolution. It has made the front page of Time magazine, and it is regularly reported in the popular newspapers that brain scientists have proved something or other. Brain science books like Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink (2005), Antonio Damasio’s Descartes’ Error (1995), Read Montague’s Your Brain Is (Almost) Perfect (2007) and Martin Lindstrom’s Buy-ology (2008) are to be found on the popular bookshelves rather than the specialist sections of bookstores.

The term ‘neuromarketing’ is now freely used in the marketing media and is one of the hottest topics at conferences. It was only coined in 2002.

At the last estimate there were some 100 organizations offering neuromarketing measurements. Similarly the claims about marketing companies that are investing in these technologies appear to be overwhelming. Some business schools now have courses called ‘neuromarketing’ or something similar. ^* Creative directors are now stating confidently at conferences that ‘Neuroscience has proved…’. They are especially prone to point out that research respondents lie, or cannot tell the truth, because they just don’t know why they buy brands, and neuroscience has proven this. The popular media have articles that claim the ‘buy button’ has been found. Organizations like Commercial Alert are pressing the US government to stop funding research at Baylor College because it is using brain scanning equipment for commercial purposes – to find the buy button.

To most marketers it appears as if there is some revolution out there that they are not part of, and need to become part of as soon as possible. In this milieu it is not surprising that snake oil salesmen will abound.

Having written The Advertised Mind, which is now available in nine languages, I am often asked questions about neuromarketing by journalists. As a visiting professor at the Copenhagen Business School, where I co-lecture with a neuro-psychologist, I had to get my material sorted into bite-sized chunks for lectures. As the Chairman of Millward Brown (South Africa), I am exposed to the evaluation of these neuromarketing technologies in terms of their viability and what they actually measure, in a situation where there is an abundance of actual empirical consumer research.

I really sympathize with the average marketer’s problem of trying to make sense of what neuromarketing is about and even whether it leads to new marketing thinking.

The meta- and the micro-problem

The real problem for a marketer is that neuromarketing has achieved very little, and at the same time very much.

At a meta-level, neuroscience made a great breakthrough in 1995 when the neurologist Antonio Damasio published the book Descartes’ Error, which changed the paradigm about the role of emotions. Since Descartes, 300 years ago, said ‘I think, therefore I am’, which we have philosophically equated with ‘I am rational, therefore I am’, we have seen emotions as something that interfere with rationality. Damasio changed the whole paradigm by positing ‘I have emotions, therefore I am rational.’ This could be the biggest philosophical thought that we have seen in 300 years. In itself this changes some of the thinking by philosophers and psychologists and of disciplines like economics, evolutionism, sociology and consumer behaviour. It is probably on a par with Darwin’s insights on evolution. It should be noted that when Darwin published The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals in 1872 he recognized the importance of emotions.

Damasio’s statement has been latched on to by people talking at marketing conferences and writing marketing books, some interpreting it as saying that we are not rational, but we are emotional. This is not what Damasio proposes, and in his subsequent book (1999) he laments the fact that some people present his thinking this way.

At a micro-level, we are now able to measure some things about the biology of the brain. We can insert people into fMRI machines and plot the topography of their brains or even see which parts are active when the person performs a thinking task. These machines weigh 4 tons and generate a magnetic field that is 600,000 times that of the earth. We are very limited in the type of experiments we can use them for. We can also place electrodes on people’s heads and read the electronic waves in their brain.

Over-claiming

There are really two ‘experiments’ that most marketers are aware of: 1) Read Montague (a neuro-computational psychologist) repeated the Pepsi Challenge while his respondents were in fMRI machines and reported this in Your Brain Is (Almost) Perfect ; 2) Martin Lindstrom scanned 2,081 people (mostly by electroencephalography – EEG) on a variety of tasks and published the results in Buy-ology (2008). Martin Lindstrom’s subtitle for his book is How Everything We Believe about Why We Buy Is Wrong. Read Montague’s conclusion is that, while neuroscience is delivering on its promise to view the brain, it still has more to learn from psychology than psychology has to learn from neuroscience.

I believe, like Montague, that neuroscientists still have more to learn from disciplines like marketing and the social sciences that have studied consumer decision making and have mountains of empirical data.

Emotions and feelings

Nearly all the work that has been done in this area considers the role of emotions, and most talks about this area include the role that the neuroscientists and psychologists have proposed for emotions. Briefly, this role is that emotions are the result of things in our environment and they ready us for action, ie they happen very fast and seldom last longer than a few seconds. This works very well when we try to explain the attention being given to an advertisement.

However, it does not work when we try to explain the feelings component about brands, which is really the soma that Damasio’s theorem is based on. (We will discuss soma in subsequent chapters.) This has been overlooked by most people in the hype of the new definition of what emotions are all about.

Where does this leave us?

I won’t be going along with the hype about neuromarketing and making unreasonable suggestions about how to market a brand. However, after reading this book the reader will have a good idea about what we know about how the brain works – and also what we don’t know yet. The reader should understand enough to be able to ask sensible questions when presented with an argument that states ‘Neuroscience has proved that…’ or at least be very sceptical.

On a much more pragmatic level, I have also written about some marketing practices that are supported by our knowledge from neuroscience as being good practice.

The puzzle

This book is about how people think and how people think about brands. What people do involves making decisions, which is simply making choices between available options. A very large portion of what people do involves decisions about brands. These are not only the brands they eat and drink, but the brands they work for to get money, the brands they use to save this money at, the brand of store they buy things from, the brands they drive to, the brands they work for, the brand of area that they want to live in (even the country), the brand of house style they live in, the brand of neighbourhood they want to be in, the brand of political party they vote for, the brand of books they buy, the brand of newspaper they buy, the brand of television they watch, the brand of movie they go to, the brand of husband or wife they desire, the brand of child they want to raise, the brand of school or church this brand of child will go to, the brand…

All of these brands are decisions people take, ie behaviour. Like a jigsaw puzzle, the brain consists of many pieces, each unique in appearance and function. All these work interdependently, and in harmony, to produce the big picture. The big picture is termed ‘behaviour’. If only one piece of the brain is faulty then the big picture is often faulty.

To complete a jigsaw puzzle you need to know the picture on the cover of the box, and you need to study the individual pieces when trying to assemble the puzzle. If you do not know what the final picture looks like and merely proceed by trying to assemble the pieces you will waste your time. Similarly, just looking at the picture on the cover tells you very little about the way the puzzle is assembled.

Something similar is true of the brain. The biological sciences study the pieces of the brain. The social sciences study the total picture, ie the output from the brain. Naturalists study the brain in action in animal behaviour. Sociologists study the brain and its interaction with other brains. Engineers contribute by designing machines that measure the brain or even simulate the brain. Even artists study the brain and the way it gains pleasure from music and art.

It can truly be said that everybody in the world has a view about the output of the brain (the picture on the cover of the box). We all need to know how other people and animals will react to actions we take. Without such a view of the brains of other people and animals, people will be unable to function in society. Without such a view they will not be able to bring up their children.

Until recently it has been impossible to study the pieces of a living human brain. It was really only possible to observe abnormal behaviour in people and, upon their death, to inspect their brains for abnormalities. We are then left to make the assumption that these abnormalities were the cause for the abnormal behaviour. With the highly interactive nature of the pieces of the brain, this was truly unsatisfactory.

On occasions brain surgery removed parts of a brain, and then we could observe changes in behaviour. Again the highly interactive nature of the pieces of the brain limited such studies. We could do experiments on animals, but we could not ask them questions after the operation to determine what had changed. We could really draw only very broad generalized conclusions from such experiments.

Technology has now enabled us to measure (or scan) the parts of living human brains in action. Until recently this has been accessible only to neurologists and neuro-psychologists, but this has changed. It is now possible to selectively ‘knock out’ specific brain areas for a while and then to observe changes in behaviour. From this has come an integration of the scientists who study the puzzle of the human brain.

In a jigsaw of a nature scene all pieces contribute to ...