The Buying Brain: Secrets for Selling to the Subconscious Mind (11 page)

The Secret to Scent Memories

The special memory system for senses, for things that you remember, is episodic memory. We have many other memory systems: procedural, semantic, short-term, long-term, and so forth.

But, episodic memory is the function that may best be described as a mental time machine that stores memories about “
what, where, and when.
” This system is younger and more complex than our other memory systems, and is most developed in human beings.

The episodic memory system is usually not mature until a child has reached roughly the age of five—not until then can the child recall events and at the same time relate them to particular places and times. To evoke powerful memories, choose the scents of childhood: warm grass after a summer rain, cinnamon, and the salty ocean air. The Buying Brain will link those long-stored pleasant associations with your brand, product, or environment.

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While humans generate the most lasting visual or audio memories between the ages of 15 and 30 (that’s why the songbook of your adolescence remains so poignant), the more powerful memories that have to do with smell are a pony ride straight back to childhood. Studies have consistently found that humans’

peak smelling ability ranges from 5 to 10 years old
. During those years, we have the opportunity to experience many smells for the first time, and the luxury of time to revel in them.

Deploying Scent in the Marketplace

We make such immediate, deep, and emotional connections with the smells we
encounter, it makes perfect “sense” to make scents available to delight and engage
the brains of our consumers.

In
How Customers Think
,
NeuroFocus Advisory Board member Gerald Zaltman notes that, “Olfactory cues are hardwired into the brain’s limbic system, the seat of emotion, and stimulate vivid recollections.” Once a scent is embedded in an individual’s brain, even visual cues can cause it to be resurrected and even “experienced.” According to Zaltman, “A TV commercial showing a person savoring the aroma of freshly brewed coffee can trigger these same olfactory sensations in viewers.” (See Chapter 9 for more detail on how the Mirror Neuron System stimulates reactive motion in the brain.) Zaltman sees scents shoring up marketing efforts in several ways. They can be “memory markers” that help a person recall familiar brands more than unfamiliar ones. They can also change the way we process information, for example, a lemon aroma can make us more alert. Zaltman speculates that scents of that type could be helpful when introducing a new product. Now with EEG testing, we can help determine which smells work best in which environment.

Olfactory Brand Marketing

Brands are probably the first and highest form of olfactory branding: Smell a Starbuck’s coffeehouse with your eyes closed, for instance, and you know you can be nowhere else. Fall under the suntan coconut seduction of a Tommy Bahama store and you’re halfway to the beach before you reach the cash counter. Johnson’s Baby Powder carries powerful scents of soothing and P1: OTA/XYZ

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comfort that cross many lines, and the smell of Gain detergent has a following of its own. Does your brand have a unique, iconic scent signature? Could it benefit from real, immediate, deeply embedded, and supremely emotional connections of fun and pleasure?

Olfactory Product Marketing

How many among us have wandered by a patisserie chicken roaster in our local supermarkets only to be seduced by the smell of grandma’s chicken and potatoes dinner? Why do stores incorporate coffee grinders in their aisles to give us a fresh, unfettered access to the brand new blends? How might an apple spice cake smell resonate in a coffee shop or bistro or the bakery section of a large supermarket? Doesn’t the smell of fresh linens make you feel more comfortable and more “tucked in” when you’re abroad?

Always take into account the
smell of your offering.
Even if it’s the best in its class in terms of taste, it will fail in the market if the packaging causes it to smell fake or plastic.

Sexual Noses

Women have more sensitive noses than men, and are far better at putting words to olfactory experiences; men are particularly keen on the smells of their beloved.

Indeed, humans tend to prefer mates who have a slightly different genetic make-up than they do. This ensures a healthy, robust population, with a sizeable immune system.

Olfactory Environment Marketing

We know, for example, that the soft scent of lemon increases sales in seafood restaurants. The subtle smell of grass near the dairy aisle could take consumers back to a simpler, more carefree time, and subconsciously remind them of the fields the products come from. In high-end car or luggage stores, the rich, deep scent of polished leather calls to mind luxury, relaxation, and reward. In clothing stores, the invigorating scent of the sea or the romantic mix of roses and violets suffuses the experience and makes purchasing a product associated with those memories powerful. Realtors know that cookies baking seduce buyers into considering a “property” a home.

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Proust’s Madeleine

Perhaps the most famous adage to memory from smell and taste comes to us from Marcel Proust, who experiences a soul awakening from a smell/taste combination he experienced as a child:
No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than
a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that
was happening to me
. . .
And suddenly the memory revealed itself. The taste was
that of the little piece of madeleine, which on Sunday mornings at Combray
. . .

my aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of tea or ti-sane. The sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I
tasted it
.

Taste

Breast milk is the first thing most of us taste and it primes us for a preference for sweet, warm foods. At the perfect temperature, accompanied by love, rocking, a sense of safety, stroking, smiles, and coos, it’s a delightful debut into a world of senses that await us for the rest of our lives.

Every creature on Earth has a way to take in nutrients. In our case, it’s the mouth, whose main job is to hold the tongue, a thick, mucousy slab of muscle. But, in humans and other higher life forms, the mouth holds an even higher charge—to bring us taste in all its symphonies, the revelation of a great wine, the paralysis that occurs after a bite of the chocolatier’s best, or the face-contorting delight of a curry with just the right balance of spice. As with most of our other senses, taste is also a powerful deterrent, immediately laying down aversions to tastes that are against our better interests.

Taste and Smell

Although different,
smell and taste share a common goal
and often operate in synchrony. For example, like smell, taste is a chemoreceptor, meaning that both senses specialize in detecting the chemical scents and tastes we encounter. While they are separate senses with their own receptor organs, these two senses act together to allow us to distinguish thousands of different flavors.

The interaction between taste and smell explains why loss of the sense of smell causes a serious reduction in the overall taste experience, which we

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call flavor. Here’s how those two senses combine to provide us the optimum experience of flavor.

Taste signals in the sensory cells are transferred to the ends of nerve fibers, which send impulses along cranial nerves to taste regions in the brainstem.

From here, the impulses are relayed to the thalamus and on to the cerebral cortex for conscious perception of taste.

We tend to smell something before we taste it. Often, mere smelling is enough to make us salivate. Of the two, smell is the first on the scene. Smell hits our brains very quickly. It takes 25,000 times more molecules of cherry pie to taste it than to smell it.

Desires

It may seem like it’s all about ice cream, but really it’s all about neurotransmitters. Some foods stimulate endorphins, morphine-like painkillers and mood elevators. These include salty foods, greasy foods, candy, and sweets.

Carbohydrate cravings are driven by a need to increase the level of serotonin in the brain and as such, they are sedating. By the way, your cravings may even be genetic. Identical twins, separated at birth, crave the same things, while fraternal twins don’t.

Taste in the Marketplace

Taste stimulation is one of the senses most easily set off by the Mirror Neuron system.

Anytime you display an appetizing product, be sure the consumer can see it being enjoyed by another. This is the key to stimulating desire, and, most importantly, to moving to purchase. See Chapter 9 for the story of “Monkey See, Monkey Do.”

Give food and beverages a visual “voice.” Too often, we use words to describe, for example, “a tall, frothy beer” when a picture would say so much more.

Don’t display obviously fake items, like miniature plastic tables in or around food items. They detract from the realism and, thus, the appetite the consumer generates for the product.

Hearing

Hearing gives us information vital to survival, for instance, by alerting us to an approaching car or fire engine. But, our sense of sound is more than P1: OTA/XYZ

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perfunctory. Hearing allows us to generate deep, nostalgic memories associated with highly emotional moments accompanied by sound: Lullabies
do
lull babies to sleep. Even earlier, the mother’s heartbeat and respiration soothe and calm the baby. Later, lovers celebrate their favorite song, the laughter of children delights any ear in range, the song of birds by your window, the rocking glory of a Rolling Stones concert, and all are extraordinary treats for our brains. We mark our traditional passages with music, for example, weddings, funerals, and graduations.

Our pupils widen and endorphins rise when we sing and there is a scientifically validated healing quality to singing. Comatose patients respond to music.

The dying relax when music is played.

The sounds your product makes and the background “noise” of your shopping environment are a critical part of its
Neurological Iconic Signature
(NIS).
When the Buying Brain hears the soda sizzle, the chip snap, or the coffee sipped, Mirror Neurons fire in some urgency: “I want that! Get me that!”

The sounds that accompany peak experience are critical to its enjoyment, and to its retention in memory. When casinos removed the tinkling of coins from one-armed bandits, I think they did a lot of damage to the fun of winning and being around winners in the coin machines. Which would you prefer: a joyous cacophony of nickels hitting the aluminum trays all around you, or a quiet prompt to insert your card to transfer your winnings?

Touch

If our predator’s vision is a relatively recent development in human sense ability, and our primal sense of smell is the most emotionally direct of our senses, touch has the honor of being the oldest human sense, the most urgent, and the most integral to our survival and evolution. Every other sense organ has, well, an organ you can point to: nose, eyes, mouth, and ears. But,
our
organ of touch is us
.

Think about it: If touch didn’t feel good, we wouldn’t sustain our relationships or produce offspring. But it does, and we do. Before he even hears his mother’s heartbeat an infant feels her warm womb swaddling him, and her respiration soothes him. In his close, calming cradle, he sleeps and wakes, rocked by the gentle rhythms of her movements.

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As you must now expect, early humans who did more touching produced lasting pair bonds and healthier infants who survived to produce offspring already trained in the healing power of touch. Not coincidentally, sex is the number one touch pleasure. And what a grand design that our species’ goal is also our greatest pleasure!