Chapter 24
Ten Scientific Pillars Underlying Neuromarketing
In This Chapter
Identifying the most important scientific foundations of neuromarketing
Reviewing how nonconscious processes change the understanding of consumer behavior
Remembering why consumers aren’t always rational
In this book, we devote a lot of space to highlighting the scientific foundations of neuromarketing. Here we review ten of the most important scientific concepts that underlie the field. Each of these ideas represents a significant discovery in one of the brain sciences: neuroscience, social psychology, or behavioral economics. Each has big implications for our understanding of how and why consumers act the way they do — what they like, how they choose, and why they buy.
System 1 and System 2
Daniel Kahneman didn’t invent the System 1–System 2 model of brain processes, but his work over the last several decades has popularized it as one of the most useful overarching frameworks for understanding how the human brain works and, in particular, how the nonconscious and conscious parts of the mind work together. We discuss the significance of this model in Chapters 2 and 8.
System 1 and System 2 are neutral terms describing two distinct sensory processing and decision-making systems in the brain. System 1 is fast; System 2 is slow. System 1 is automatic and outside our control; System 2 is voluntary and under our control. System 1 makes intuitive judgments based on simple associations and is biased toward action and belief; System 2 is more cautious and makes judgments based on logic and evidence.
The existence of System 1 was hidden until a few decades ago because System 2 is the only system we’re aware of. The two systems work together, not in opposition to each other. System 2 usually operates as a controller of System 1, but it is a lazy controller, so most of our everyday impressions, reactions, and decisions are driven by System 1 processes.
This model is key to understanding why traditional approaches to market research are at risk and why neuromarketing has emerged as an alternative and extension. Market research before the emergence of neuromarketing was based on a System 2 view of the brain. All three workhorses of market research discussed in Chapter 15 — interviews, focus groups, and surveys — assume that consumers have access to their own mental states and can accurately describe what they like and why they choose.
But brain science has amassed vast amounts of evidence showing that this assumption is incorrect and that consumers regularly use System 1 processes they’re not aware of. These processes bias consumer behavior in predictable ways that don’t correspond to the expectations of logic. Neuromarketing has emerged because it offers new research methods that can measure these System 1 processes and provide new insights into how and why consumers respond to marketing and act in the marketplace.
Priming
Priming is the psychological mechanism by which System 1 influences what we think and do as human beings and, of course, as consumers. Described in detail in Chapter 5, priming can be thought of as the System 1 alternative to persuasive messaging. Persuasion requires that people pay attention to a message, judge it to be correct and reasonable, and remember it. Priming requires none of these things.
Priming is based on the mental process of associative activation, the brain’s ability to automatically and rapidly trigger associated ideas and concepts when an idea comes to mind. Bring the idea of “dog” to mind, and your brain immediately activates a massive network of doggy associations. These associations don’t flood into your conscious mind (that would overwhelm you), but they become more accessible to your conscious mind as you deliberate about the particular dog-related issue you’re considering. Bring the idea of “pancakes” to mind, and a completely different network of associations is activated. This is how our brains anticipate the world around us, and prepare us for action in any circumstance.
Priming is one of the main mechanisms by which marketing operates, and it significantly impacts the decisions we make as consumers. Advertising is a prime. Product placement in movies is a prime. Images and displays in stores are primes. Priming is a nonconscious process, so you can’t learn how it’s operating by just asking people.
A key thing to remember about priming is that it doesn’t follow the rules of logic that govern System 2 processes. Priming simply makes some things more accessible to downstream mental processes than other things. The ideas involved in priming don’t have to be connected in any rational way. For example, as we describe in Chapter 8, giving people a pen with green ink primes them to increase their stated preference for green products.
Emotional “Somatic Markers”
Emotions operate at two levels in our mental lives: one conscious, the other nonconscious. Conscious emotions are what we usually call feelings. Nonconscious emotions are what psychologists call affective states, and they include emotional somatic markers, first discovered by neuroscientist Antonio Damasio. These somatic markers (which we call emotional markers in Chapter 6) play a crucial role in consumer decisions and responses to marketing.
Emotional markers are memories of bodily responses to experiences in the past. The emotional contents of these experiences (positive or negative, low or high intensity) are coded in memory and accessed by mental response routines that do not pass through conscious deliberation — in other words, they occur outside our awareness. Emotional markers can be triggered by primes and influence the accessibility of other thoughts when the prime is encountered.
For consumers, emotional markers play a big role in judgment and choice, greatly simplifying how we interact with the marketing world around us. Even though we may not be aware of the degree of attraction or aversion we may have “marked” for a given product or brand, those markers provide us with a nonconscious shortcut to a quick and intuitive response that “feels right” and simplifies our decision making (see Chapter 8).
According to Damasio’s somatic marker hypothesis, emotional markers are created and updated by every experience we have in our lives. This means that every time a consumer encounters a product or brand — whether directly (through personal use or consumption) or indirectly (through exposure to marketing) — is an opportunity to slightly change that consumer’s emotional markers in either a positive or negative direction and influence the consumer’s later behavior. Accordingly, understanding and measuring the direction and intensity of emotional markers in target audiences should be fundamentally important to product and brand managers in businesses of all sizes.
Processing Fluency
Processing fluency is an attribute of a stimulus (something observable in the real world around us that our brains perceive and react to), not something we generate in our minds (like an emotional marker). When we say something has processing fluency, we simply mean that it’s easy for our minds to process. Social psychologists have found that many features of a stimulus can create processing fluency, including redundancy, symmetry, and contrast. Also, prior exposure to an object, which increases its familiarity, appears to reliably improve processing fluency (see Chapter 10).
Priming and processing fluency are related. Researchers have found that objects that are preceded by a perceptual (visually related) or conceptual (meaning related) prime are more easily processed than non-primed objects. They also tend to be more liked than non-primed objects, and may even be judged as more familiar than they really are.
Processing fluency is important to marketing because our brains are cognitive misers that don’t like to work (that is, think) too hard. So, when something comes along that’s easy to process, we tend to give it special treatment. As described in Chapter 5, processing fluency has a disproportionate influence on many of our judgments and decisions as consumers. A product, package, or ad that is easy to process is more likely to be seen as more familiar, more truthful, more beautiful, less risky, and more trustworthy.
Misattribution
One of the things scientists have learned from studying System 1 and System 2 processes separately is that System 1 is sloppy. It makes connections and guides behavior based on simple associations, not logic. When System 1 makes a connection, it assumes that connection to be true and real, and it starts triggering a cascade of additional connections that follow from it. Unless System 2 steps in to override this process with conscious deliberation, we’re likely to respond and act as if all these associations were true and real.
But as we’ve seen in the example of processing fluency, as well as many other examples presented throughout this book, many of the shortcuts our System 1 judgment and decision-making processes use are based on misattribution. When you mistake processing fluency for truth, beauty, trustworthiness, or familiarity, you’re making a misattribution. When you fail to see that adding a more expensive decoy product to a store display has influenced your buying decision, and instead attribute your choice to a longstanding preference, you’re making a misattribution.
Misattribution usually isn’t a big problem. Often it gets us to the right outcome, even if it gets us there by the wrong route. A product that presents itself fluently, clearly, and simply is likely to be a good product that delivers on its promise. And if it isn’t, a negative usage experience will quickly adjust our expectations so that we’re no longer fooled by its lure of processing fluency. Misattribution can be a bigger problem for large, infrequent purchases, but in those cases we’re much less likely to bypass System 2 as part of our decision process, so System 1 misattribution is actually less likely to be decisive in such situations.
For marketers and market researchers, misattribution can be a significant danger when conclusions are derived from asking consumers questions and believing their answers. Even when people are completely honest and sincere, if they’re misattributing the sources of their judgments and decisions, their self-reports will lead researchers astray. As discussed in Chapter 2, this is one of the major justifications for the growing popularity of neuromarketing measurement techniques that do not rely on self-reporting.
Nonconscious Goal Pursuit
One of the most remarkable and counterintuitive findings of social psychology is the discovery of nonconscious goal pursuit in human (and consumer) choice and behavior. Nonconscious goals are covered in detail in Chapter 7 because they provide an important mechanism that connects priming to consumer actions. Nonconscious goals can be activated by a wide variety of motivational primes, including social situations, people, brands, ads, and social norms.
Once activated, nonconscious goals are pursued exactly like conscious goals, but without conscious awareness:
They’re pursued over extended periods of time.
They persist in the face of obstacles.
If interrupted, we resume pursuing a goal at the first opportunity, even if intrinsically more attractive activities are available to us.
The strength of goal motivation increases over time until fulfilled.
When the goal motivation is fulfilled, it disappears rapidly.
The outcome of goal pursuit — whether success or failure in reaching the goal — can change a person’s mood and behavior after the fact.
Nonconscious goals are important to marketing because they can influence product preferences, choices, and shopping behavior. An important lesson for marketers is that the relationship between primes and goals has to be tested — it can’t be assumed. Primes may not trigger the goals you expect. For example, we document in Chapter 7 the existence of persuasion correction goals, which can be triggered when consumers feel they’re being subjected to persuasion pressure. Priming that appears to be benign and positive to a marketing professional may, in fact, be generating nonconscious resistance, rather than acceptance, of a marketing message. The complexity and subtlety of nonconscious goal pursuit don’t make the marketer’s job any easier.
Because consumers don’t have access to their nonconscious goals, nonconscious goal pursuit has to be studied indirectly, inferring goal activation and pursuit from consumer choices and behaviors in field and controlled experimental contexts. Neuromarketing methods are required to observe and measure the strength of nonconscious goals in action.
Low-Attention Processing
Another counterintuitive finding that is important to neuromarketing is the discovery that attention may not be good for advertising effectiveness. Attention would seem to be a necessary condition for advertising effectiveness, but brain research has shown that “obvious” truth to sometimes be at odds with the realities of System 1 processing, emotional responses, conditioning, and implicit memory. Ads that rely on emotional connections and repetitive conditioning to reinforce brand associations can paradoxically have a greater effect on us when we aren’t paying attention to them than when we are.
As described in Chapter 11, low-attention processing operates as part of the indirect route to advertising effectiveness. Unlike logical persuasion, conditioning does not require attention to create memories and learning. On the contrary, research shows that attention may actually inhibit effective conditioning, because it can trigger counterarguing in the mind of the viewer. Nothing kills the impact of an amusing ad more than stopping to realize just how illogical its basic premise actually is.
Leveraging low-attention processing does not make sense when advertising a new product, or when trying to convince people to take a direct action, like make a donation or call a toll-free number. But more and more campaigns appear to be embracing the low-attention processing model to build more positive associations with brands without communicating any kind of explicit persuasive message. To the extent that resistance to marketing and persuasive appeal is high, marketing that takes advantage of the low-attention processing principle will provide an alternative way for marketers to build product and brand relationships with consumers.
Implicit Memory
Implicit memory is another amazing nonconscious process that underlies many neuromarketing principles and measurement techniques. Because we naturally think of memorization as effortful, the idea that our brains can constantly record limitless amounts of information without any conscious effort is at first hard to accept. But upon reflection, it seems inevitable. How else can we remember where we put the keys, how to ride a bike, or how to find our way back to that new Starbucks we discovered yesterday?
As we show in Chapter 11, implicit memory has some extraordinary properties:
Whereas explicit memory requires effort, fades relatively quickly, and has to be reinforced regularly, implicit memory is triggered effortlessly and appears to last indefinitely.
Implicit memory operates automatically, outside our conscious awareness, so we have no direct control over it.
Implicit memory doesn’t depend on attention.
Implicit memory has a huge capacity compared to explicit memory.
A final important property of implicit memory is that it can’t be voluntarily recalled, so it’s invisible to all methodologies that rely on self-reported recall. The only way it can be measured is by using indirect neuromarketing techniques like the word-completion task described in Chapter 13.
Implicit Decisions
As we establish in Chapter 1 and elaborate on throughout this book, human brains are cognitive misers — thinking is hard and we try to avoid it if we can. A particularly difficult task is making decisions. So, it should come as no surprise that we’ve adopted emotional cues and triggers as decision-making aids to give our cognitive-miser brains easy shortcuts to make decisions quickly and without a lot of cognitive exertion.
Implicit decisions occur when we bypass conscious deliberation and make the mental leap from nonconscious impressions and reactions to choice behavior. As we saw in Chapter 8, implicit decisions are driven by automatic, effortless, System 1 processes that often don’t feel like decisions at all. Because they bypass conscious deliberation, they’re experienced without any internal questioning or weighing of arguments, so they’re immune to classic persuasive messaging. This, of course, creates some problems for advertisers who believe they need to rely on persuasive messaging to influence behavior.
The reality of implicit decisions creates an even more fundamental risk for traditional research techniques. When people make implicit decisions, they don’t have access to the sources of their decisions. This in itself is a big challenge — one that neuromarketing addresses with alternative techniques. But the bigger problem is that people don’t know that they don’t know why they make implicit decisions, so they query their memories and come up with plausible explanations, which they report to researchers and sincerely believe to be true. Unfortunately, these stories tend to be rationalizations, not explanations, and they often produce poor predictions of future behavior as a result.
Reverse Inference
Our final top-ten scientific foundation for neuromarketing is the logic of reverse inference, which we introduce in Chapter 19. Reverse inference may seem like a simple logical puzzle, but it’s fundamental to the core logic of neuromarketing. It provides the bridge between academic research in the brain sciences and the practical application of that research in neuromarketing.
Reverse inference tells us how much confidence we should have in a neuromarketing finding expressed in the form: “This brain or body response has occurred; therefore, this mental state has taken place.” For example, if we observe with facial expression analysis software that a person has smiled while watching an ad (a body response), what is the likelihood that the ad made that person happy (a mental state)?
The logic of reverse inference says that this likelihood can never be 100 percent. Suppose a statement has been validated by evidence from 1,000 studies:
All people who feel happy while watching an ad display a smile.
Even all this evidence does not logically justify the reverse inference:
This person smiled while watching an ad; therefore, the ad made them happy.
Reverse inference tells us that any neuromarketing finding is probabilistic (based in part on chance), never certain. The degree to which you should believe a neuromarketing finding depends on the weight of the existing evidence supporting the inference, combined with your confidence that the experiment was properly designed and conducted so that alternative causes of the observed results were controlled for.
If you’re satisfied that the experiment was sound, you should have increased confidence that the reverse inference is true, but you can never be 100 percent certain that it’s true — you can only be more certain than you were before the experiment was performed.