Buyology: Your Brain’s Charge Card
Self-styled marketing guru Martin Lindstrom has followed up Brand Sense with the much-discussed Buyology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy, his own tale of a multiyear journey through the most in-depth scientific study ever conducted on why we buy what we buy and why some brands “stick” and others don’t. Lindstrom secured funding from international corporations and conducted his study in several countries in order to cast a wide net of subjects. The resulting book is entertaining and yet the results of the study are somewhat counterintuitive.
Without ruining the ending, which I would never want to do, the main thesis of Buyology seems to be that neuroscience and analysis can tell us far more about how the human mind handles the abstract concept of “brand” than traditional notions of market research can. This seems obvious. After all, humans are strange animals, and predicting our behavior is a crapshoot.
We must realize that research like Lindstrom’s isn’t the Rosetta Stone of marketing. The research is solid and pretty darn intriguing, but it does run into a problem now and again when it collides with the intangible human portion of the recipe.
Early on, during a section about a research project regarding advertising during the course of the ‘04 presidential election, the scientists reached this conclusion: “Despite widespread cries that political advertising emphasize “optimism,” “hope,” “building up, not tearing down,” and so on, fear works. It’s what our brains remember.”
This year, we have seen cases where it is simply not true. Have we encountered an exception to the rule or is there no quantifiable rule here after all? Why did Americans choose Barack Hussein Obama in 2008 in overwhelming numbers even when “optimism” and “hope” have been scientifically proven to be disqualifiers? There is something here that brain tech can’t grasp.
Then, another study in Buyology concluded that frequent smokers understand the risks involved with smoking, but that after being shown disgusting black-lung warning labels, they still want the sticks. The brain scans saw the brain processing the images, and recognized how bad they were, but that part of the consciousness disregarded this in favor of that ole nicotine high. Smokers ignore warning labels. Of course they do! They are physiologically addicted to the chemicals in cigarettes! Addicts cannot be dissuaded from behaviors that their body craves, even if they subconsciously know those behaviors are unhealthful. Yep, decades of research on that one.
The point is that while the overly conscientious research in Buyology should open the eyes of anyone involved in our marketing businesses it is not the be-all, end-all in the quest for data in marketing. Lindstrom reminds us that information-gathering is evolving all the time. Gallup polls may soon be antiquated (are they now?) and marketers will need to find crucial information about everything some other way.
Brain tech may be a key piece of forging this next frontier of figuring what the consumer really wants (Lindstrom made a compelling case in the previous book) but it simply cannot be the only one. There are human elements that are even less quantifiable than those thousands of brain scans. In Outliers the curly-haired Gladwell proves beyond a 5 o’clock shadow that humans are capable of devising wayward rules that affect and control the decisions we make—and our destinies. Maybe it wasn’t the best idea for Punk Marketing to read both of these books concurrently.
Pinning down the brain is nearly impossible—as humans we complicate everything we do. I realized as the book snapped shut that this, in the end, belies “buyology.”
