Chapter 23
Ten Mistaken Beliefs about Neuromarketing
In This Chapter
Separating fact from fiction about neuromarketing
Putting neuromarketing news and opinions in context
Avoiding the hype about neuromarketing
Add brain science to market research, and the public will accept it with open arms. That’s what neuromarketers assumed when the field first emerged. Some early pioneers overhyped the capabilities of neuromarketing and created more than a little backlash among traditional research vendors, scientists, and journalists. Some of that criticism was justified — but some was based on faulty assumptions that can still be heard in many discussions of neuromarketing, pro and con. We address ten of those faulty assumptions here.
Your Brain Has a “Buy Button”
You can probably recall more than one movie in which an evil villain takes over a person’s mind and makes him do things he wouldn’t ordinarily do. In the movies, it’s usually a “kill button” that the bad guy presses, but in discussions of neuromarketing, it’s the “buy button” that people are worried about. How real is this concern? Can it really happen, or is it just a good Hollywood plot device?
This concern has been expressed by consumer protection groups that fear that neuromarketing represents some kind of new, super-powerful marketing technique that consumers will be unable to resist. We believe it’s always good to keep a watchful eye on marketing, because excesses and even outright fraud do sometimes occur. But in this case, we believe the underlying premise is incorrect.
First, there is no scientific evidence that any location or system exists in the brain that acts as a “buy button.” At best, this is simply a false application of the idea of a reflex. A complex process is completely different from tapping someone on the knee to make his or her leg bounce.
Second, even though it’s undeniable that people use nonconscious processes when acting as consumers, those processes can’t simply be co-opted by marketers. We’ve seen evidence that some of these processes are “corrective” and can protect people from being overly persuaded by marketing. In other words, if people insist on using the “buy button” metaphor, we believe they should be ready to talk about a “don’t buy button” as well. Our nonconscious processes drive an approach-and-avoidance system, not just an approach system.
The story of “subliminal advertising” is often raised as evidence that appealing to the nonconscious brain can control behavior. But we know today that the supposed experiment that “proved” this principle — conducted by James Vicary at a movie house in 1957, in which he claimed to have increased snack sales by flashing subliminal messages (messages flashed on the screen too quickly for people to consciously see them) during the movie was a fake. Perhaps this was the first recorded instance of overhyping neuromarketing! Numerous real studies on the effects of subliminal messages have been done since then. They’ve shown, without exception, that people do perceive these messages subconsciously, and that they can have an effect on subsequent behavior, but the effects are small and short-lived and can’t produce the kind of results Vicary imagined.
The “zombie consumer” is indeed science-fiction fantasy, and although there is still much to learn about the human mind, there is no evidence that there is anything like a “buy button” in the human brain.
Marketing Can Control You
Depending on your definition of control, you could’ve been under the control of great branding by the For Dummies series when you bought this book. The familiar yellow-and-black cover, the catchy title, the convenient store display, and the familiar brand all contributed to your decision. But did these factors make you buy the book against your will? We don’t think so. You could’ve bought Goldfish For Dummies instead.
We believe “control” is quite different from “influence.” What control means to us is no chance of an alternate route — you have to do what your controller wants you to do. This scenario is simply unrealistic in the world of consumer choice that we live in today. Thanks to competition, there is always an alternate route, an alternate product, and an alternate choice.
Influence is about probabilities, not certainties. If you see an ad, your probability of buying a product may increase by 5 percent. But if you’ve used a product ever since you were a kid, your probability of buying that product may be 95 percent, whether or not you saw that ad.
Influence is also about conditionality — if conditions change, your behavior may change. Even for that product you’ve been using since you were a kid, if it isn’t available in the store today, or if you don’t have enough money in your pocket to buy it, or if the manufacturer has gone out of business, you’re going to do something different. There is always that 5 percent chance you may choose an alternative.
Consumers are not helpless when it comes to resisting marketing messages. As we show in Chapter 7, persuasion is hard: People sometimes activate nonconscious goals to resist persuasive messages, frustrating the goals of marketers. Given this finding, the intuitive consumer who responds to advertising and marketing with automatic and nonconscious reactions may, in fact, be a tougher sell for marketers, not an easier one.
What about the argument that advertising is a prime (an object in the environment that triggers associated thoughts and actions automatically and outside conscious awareness), that by merely watching an ad or hearing a message, we’re irresistibly “programmed” to buy that product? We believe advertising is, in fact, a prime and can trigger behavior, but it’s important to remember the two key limitations of priming:
People can’t be primed to pursue something they don’t already feel positive about.
People are resistant to goal priming if they don’t perceive a gap between the goal and their current state.
Turn to Chapter 5 for more on priming and these two points.
Concerns like the one covered in this section often come from another mistaken belief, that nonconscious and conscious brain processes are somehow at war with each other. The brain science explained in this book shows that this isn’t the case. Instead of working against each other, our conscious and nonconscious brains operate as a very effective “tag team” that, more often than not, keeps us on track to make good (or at least good enough) decisions throughout our everyday lives.
Neuromarketing Can Implant Ideas in Your Head
It’s an extreme way to say it, but we’ll say it anyway: It’s the purpose of marketing, not neuromarketing, to plant ideas in your head. This has been a reality since the first marketing message was delivered — probably when an early cave dweller invented the two-for-one promo to move his inventory of clubs and spears.
We absorb ideas by experience, personal learning, and learning from others (either directly or vicariously). Our sense organs pour sensory impressions into our brains at an astounding rate, inputting up to 11 million bits of information every second. We’re only able to function under that onslaught of information by using highly sophisticated filtering and prioritizing processes in our brains, most of which are nonconscious and operate outside our awareness. The bottom line is that putting ideas in our heads is a complex process, and not something that can just be “done” by neuromarketing or any other external means.
Most important, the brain is not a passive receptacle that’s ready to be “filled up” by whatever material is poured into it. We build experiences and form perceptions over time, and we always have the ability to weigh options. Some persuasion techniques (for example, emotional appeals) may make us more open to considering new ideas than others, but we don’t take in messaging and automatically act on it without a huge amount of intervening brain work.
Your Nonconscious Can Overrule Your Conscious Mind
In fact, the opposite is true. Your conscious mind can always overrule your nonconscious mind, but not the other way around. This has been verified in hundreds, possibly thousands, of studies that have looked at nonconscious influences on human (and consumer) behavior. In every case, when participants in experiments are made aware of the nonconscious influence techniques that have been used in experiments, the effects go away.
The nonconscious mind definitely acts as a partner to the conscious mind, filling in much of what we see in the world around us and preparing us to respond. The nonconscious gently “nudges” one item over another to bring it to our conscious attention. And the nonconscious participates so deeply in our decision-making processes that we often fail to expend additional conscious resources to make choices.
If there is a problem in this division of labor, it isn’t that our conscious minds are unable to overrule our nonconscious minds, but that we so often choose not to, even though we’re perfectly capable of doing so.
Neuromarketing Will Kill Creativity in Marketing
Creativity in marketing is alive and well. Neuromarketing is not the enemy of creativity. Creative agencies continue to produce compelling advertising and marketing campaigns that grab consumer attention, create a small moment of joy in an otherwise uneventful day, and sometimes lead to radically improved sales, profits, and market share for lucky brands and products.
We believe neuromarketing is a type of research that actually supports the creative process, more so than traditional research. Savvy creatives have been using best practices from psychology and neuroscience for years, whether they know it or not. Explicitly learning from neuromarketing will only help them build more appealing campaigns and messaging.
Because our brains are naturally drawn to novelty (discussed in Chapter 5), we’re always on the lookout for things that stand out as new and different. Creativity in advertising is one way marketers can take advantage of this built-in curiosity to draw our attention to new products and ideas that may be good for us.
The novelty effect has its challenges because people don’t embrace new ideas easily. Our brains are still biased toward the comforts of familiarity and processing fluency (see Chapter 5). We believe the best creative minds in marketing can embrace this challenge and use their talents to help consumers accept new ideas in a creative way that will overcome their natural bias to resist the new and embrace the familiar.
Surveys and Focus Groups Are Dead
Although some neuromarketers have predicted the end of surveys and focus groups, expecting them to go away anytime soon is unrealistic. We believe marketers will start seeing these methods in a somewhat different light going forward, but we don’t expect them to go away. They provide a useful kind of value for market researchers.
When it comes to surveys, there will always be some questions that are perfectly reasonable to ask people and that are likely to get accurate responses. As we show in Chapter 15, people generally are much better at describing what they do than what they think or what they feel. Asking people to make rapid, simple, binary choices is also a good survey technique, because it minimizes biases in responses. You only start getting into trouble if you ask people why they chose option A over option B, because the odds are, they have no idea — but they’ll make up something really good!
Focus groups aren’t good for verifying anything. More scientific approaches should always be used for that purpose. The value of focus groups is that they allow marketers to experience their customers up close in a relatively natural setting. They fulfill a need for human connection that can’t be replicated in more scientific settings. The best information conveyed by focus groups is not what people say, but how they behave. Intuitive marketers can pick up these nuances and incorporate them as insights in their work. Ironically, just like intuitive consumers, intuitive marketers usually can’t articulate exactly how they do this or why or when it works.
We prefer an integrated approach to market research. What people say is often as important as what they think and what they do, but it has to be treated in context. Although the last thing a good marketer wants to do is believe everything a consumer says about the consumer’s preferences, likes, or future plans, putting that information alongside nonconscious responses provides a unique opportunity to see how people’s conscious minds interpret and rationalize what their nonconscious minds need and want.
Neuromarketing Is Inherently Evil
It’s somewhat ironic that neuromarketing explains why encountering something new and different — like neuromarketing — is often greeted by resistance and rejection. The first reaction to something new and different is, as we describe in Chapter 5, usually caution, vigilance, and (more often than not) dislike.
And so it appears to be with many initial reactions to neuromarketing. The suggestion that neuromarketing will displace traditional methods further adds to the people’s concerns that this is an alien force that needs to be repelled.
As we argue in Chapter 1, this reaction mixes up marketing and neuromarketing. Marketing can certainly be used for evil purposes, such as when it’s used to communicate fraudulent claims. But, on the whole, society sees marketing as something good and useful. We tolerate its more irritating excesses because it has a more important positive function: It brings information to the consuming public that can help them match their needs and wants with products and services that meet those needs and wants.
Neuromarketing is a new set of research techniques and insights for market research, based on brain science. It’s neither inherently evil nor inherently good. Its techniques provide some new ways to measure marketing and understand how marketing works in practice. Basing marketing decisions on a realistic understanding of how consumers’ brains are really reacting to your brands and products will always yield better results than depending on folk knowledge or magical thinking.
We also believe that neuromarketing can be a force for good, if people choose to use it that way. For example, there is no reason why neuromarketing can’t be used to improve public service messaging designed to encourage people to take better care of themselves and those around them. Insights about what’s important to the human brain may open up new possibilities for this kind of messaging that haven’t been considered before.
As neuromarketing research becomes more mainstream, the market research industry will step up efforts, already underway, to establish standards and guidelines for the ethical practice of neuromarketing, similar to the standards and guidelines it has established for other research techniques. We discuss these efforts in detail in Chapters 21 and 22.
Neuromarketing Isn’t Based on Real Research
The early days of neuromarketing were filled with more than a few exaggerated stories and claims. The scientific foundations of these assertions were, unfortunately, sometimes limited at best. Today, with the entry of more practitioners into the field and the increasing adoption of neuromarketing by large, mainstream corporations, there is greater demand for accountability and disclosure regarding the science that underlies neuromarketing. We see this trend as very positive because what makes neuromarketing compelling is not its exaggerated claims, but the depth of the real science behind it.
In this book, we go into a fair amount of detail about that real science. We do so, in part, because it’s inherently fascinating research, but also because it has been somewhat obscured by neuromarketing vendors who want to tell a simple story to sell their wares. We like simplicity — but not too much simplicity. In these pages, we show that there are three deep research disciplines that neuromarketing draws upon: neuroscience, social psychology, and behavioral economics. Each of these disciplines provides a strong foundation for neuromarketing. We believe the field can only become more credible by acknowledging its dependence on these real scientific sources.
Neuromarketing Is Only about Advertising
The science underlying neuromarketing can be applied to nearly any human endeavor. Developing and testing advertising and marketing are significant commercial foci today, but there are applications in many other areas as well. In this book, we give a sense of just how broadly neuromarketing is being applied by companies around the world. Its techniques are currently being used for applications as diverse as brand-equity testing, product development, packaging design, in-store marketing, online marketing, and entertainment. Even more applications are on the horizon (not covered in this book simply because we don’t have room for them), including legal, political, economic, and educational applications of neuromarketing.
The tendency to equate neuromarketing exclusively with advertising is probably a byproduct of the mistaken beliefs discussed earlier about the power of neuromarketing to control minds and push the “buy button” in our brains. These concerns make neuromarketing appear particularly ominous when applied to advertising. But as we saw in Chapter 11, the field of advertising research has much to learn from brain science and neuromarketing, but how to trigger a “buy button” in consumers’ brains is not one of those lessons.
All Neuromarketers Always Tell the Truth
Throughout this chapter, we’ve explored a number of skeptical attitudes toward neuromarketing, which are generally healthy but sometimes go overboard in their concerns. There is also an opposite response, which may be called “neuro-idolatry,” an irrational tendency to trust anything written or said about marketing that’s accompanied by a picture of a brain. Ever heard the phrase, “Trust me, I’m a doctor”? Well, the same rationale has been applied more than once in neuromarketing. Sadly, the invocation of neuroscience sometimes seems to have the magical ability to turn off the brains of otherwise savvy research buyers.
It’s not uncommon to see an article with brilliant images of brain scans, only to discover that the research has little to do with scientific principles or procedures. In the early “Wild West” days of neuromarketing, there was definitely an opportunity for “snake-oil salesmen” to take advantage of buyers’ ignorance and curiosity with unscrupulous claims and offers. But in the light of growing competition, alternative methods, and an ever-expanding body of underlying science, such claims are unlikely to survive scrutiny by better-informed buyers.
As with any other research methodology, it’s always important to ask the right questions and not take a vendor’s claims at face value. In Part V, we provide a lot of good ammunition for grilling neuromarketing vendors on their methods and scientific foundations. As with any research methodology, digging deep into how researchers draw conclusions and align with proven academic research is important.
Several organizations now provide excellent third-party resources to help evaluate the validity and efficacy of neuromarketing. Industry organizations like ESOMAR (www.esomar.org) and the Advertising Research Foundation (www.thearf.org) have begun creating guidelines for neuromarketing research and codes of conduct to cover research ethics in the field.