The Buying Brain: Secrets for Selling to the Subconscious Mind (27 page)

Established Brands:
Driving home the core feelings that consumers associate with your brand is key. What activates long-term memory for your brand?

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Figure 12.1

The Brand Essence Framework Core and Outer Dimensions.

Source:
NeuroFocus, Inc.

Is it the smell, the taste, a visual element? Focus on these so that the brain enjoys instantly placing this beloved friend in long-term memory repeatedly.

New Brands:
Because a new brand is an unknown, focus on Benefits and Function if it is a new commodity brand and Benefits and Feelings if it is a new luxury brand.

Commodity Brands:
Commodities should score highest on Form, Function, and Benefits. Commodities engage the brain on a practical level, stimulating a great deal of our rational cognitive processes. For commodity brands, the brain does not waste time evaluating nuances of style or engage in intensive neurological processes to assess how others in the social group would view the person using the brand. The brain asks, Is it useful? Practical? Does it meet my needs?

Luxury Brands:
Luxury brands command premium pricing. In order for the brain to consider, rationalize, and commit to paying a high price, a great deal of
emotional
response is needed to enable the
rational
thought process that justifies such expenditure. Whether it’s $25 for lip gloss, or $75,000 for a car, the brain must have a compelling emotion centered behind that purchase. Feelings, Values, and Metaphors are the brand attributes driving emotion. These must

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The Buying Brain

be strong to overcome the subconscious’ initial reluctance/resistance related to price and facilitate a purchase decision.

Emotions are means for the brain to recall large amounts of information. This means that complex purchases, such as cars and computers that involve a lot of information, will still be guided in large part by emotion.

Apple

An exploration of the brain and a compelling brand often ends up with the Apple story. Why is Apple such a beloved brand? Is it because of its elegant logo? Its pretty colors? Its proprietary, tightly held operating system? It’s all of these and more. Apple made an innately strategic decision a long time ago to help the brain do what it loves to do: identify and categorize. Apple focused on consumer ease of use, inherent fear/distrust of complicated and, therefore, intimidating technology, and designed beautiful products and packaging, which in turn gave the Apple brand enhanced meaning and an even stronger, consistent, and lasting identity. Apple also strictly controlled distribution, giving their product an identity that was separate from other computer brands.

And they adhered to price points above the category norms, imbuing the brand and the products under that umbrella with the aura of desirability.

It didn’t hurt that they chose a universally recognized symbol of the natural world—friendly, delicious, attractive, and organic, that could be stylized and still retain its subconscious attributes—as their logo.

What sets Apple apart is this beautifully consistent brand strategy, where every consumer touchpoint expresses the same brand attributes, making it delightfully easy for the brain to assign meaning and significance to this brand.

The effect on the subconscious is near irresistible, and the price is “justified”

as reasonable because it’s such a clear, direct, consistent reflection of inherent value.

Context has a huge impact
on how the brain processes an experience.

Apple understands this, especially in their retail operations. If you shop a store aisle, where everything is piled up or kept in bins, your takeaway is a perception that all is cheap. Implicitly, if it’s of value it won’t be piled up in the corner.

On the other hand, this can also work to some brands’ advantage; a bargain retailer deliberately stacks things up to give you the view that you are getting a deal.

For luxury brands, of course, the opposite is the case. When you go to a Rolex store, your watch is displayed in a locked case. And when they bring it to you, they polish it and present it on an elegant padded case. The unspoken

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but clearly communicated message is that this brand is inherently precious, highly valued, and valuable, and, therefore, worth the price. The feeling of desire is actually heightened by this air of exclusivity, reinforcing the individual elements of Rolex’s Brand Essence Framework.

Context for a Brand

How important is context to the brain? Just how important is revealed in a fascinating
experiment involving a violin and the Washington, DC, subway:
One cold, winter morning in Washington, DC, a solitary violinist played Bach and
Schubert for about 45 minutes in the corner of a Metro subway station.

About 1,000 people walked past him as he played. Every few minutes, a person
might stop for a moment or toss in a dollar or two. Other than that, no one paid much
attention to the violinist.

One young person stopped, very curious. He tried to stay, but his mother pulled him
along. He was three years old.

After 45 minutes, the violinist packed up his instrument. No one applauded, no one
spoke to him, and no one noticed his departure.

His take? $32.

The violinist was Joshua Bell, one of the world’s most famous musicians. He played
on his Stradivarius, one of the finest (and most rare and expensive) violins in existence.

The previous night, Joshua Bell had played to a sold-out concert in Boston where the
seats averaged $100.

The
Washington Post
organized the experiment as a study in context, perception, and priorities. The results speak for themselves.

Note that one of the people who was most interested in listening to Joshua was a child. As we mature, our brains learn to categorize an experience based on context. Children are less prone automatically to assign meaning to an experience based on context, and are able to perceive that some wonderful music was to be heard, despite the subway platform setting. For the adults, in that context Joshua Bell playing in the Washington, DC subway was worth $32.

In contrast, in another context, Joshua Bell performing at Boston’s Symphony Hall was worth approximately $220,000.

Humans develop the frontal lobe well into our 20s.

Frontal lobe development enables contextual processing.

So what? So, because teenagers and young adults’ brains are still developing until their 20s, greater care must be taken to develop brands and brand messaging that take that malleable state of mind into full consideration.

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Let’s get back to our client who pounded the table about mood boards.

He was seeking symbols that expressed his brand’s best attributes. How can a symbol embody so much meaning and emotion? Some symbols become so iconic that they can single-handedly impact an experience to a significant degree. Let’s explore one such symbol, the ultimate international logo of competitive sports, the Olympic Rings.

During the 2008 Olympics, there was the usual onslaught of high-profile advertising, with a coterie of top brands paying substantially for the privilege of being an official Olympic sponsor. At a price tag of $40 million, such Olympic sponsorship was a global strategic marketing play and a huge investment, but one for which there was little means of directly, accurately, and reliably measuring any resulting brand lift.

NeuroFocus conducted a DSR study to tease out the potential impact of Olympic sponsorship on consumers’ subconscious perceptions of brand image, versus the effect that only running advertising during the Games had for other brands. The Olympic brand itself has a brand essence, with “Achieve” being the leading attribute we studied.

The result: We found clearly
stronger brand lift
for ads by official Olympic sponsors compared to ads by nonsponsors. Our findings finally confirmed, in scientifically valid statistics, what earlier conventional research had only been able to intimate.

How does a brand develop such deeply resonating symbols? The Olympic Rings have been in use since 1920. Almost 100 years of exposure has been a significant factor in this symbol’s ability to evoke a deep response. Other than decades of use, how do you develop a logo and brand symbology that the brain likes to remember and become attached to?

The Resolution: The Symbology

of a Brand

To help our table-thumping client and save his fist (and the furniture) from further abuse, we devised a study to find out which of the myr-iad symbols on his mood board resonated deeply with his consumer base. The problem that he had faced was the
inability of traditional
research to uncover clear consumer preferences.

This is an ever-present and critical issue in marketing. There are two obstacles to perfectly predicting consumer behavior through traditional means. First, conventional methodologies cannot provide the same level P1: OTA/XYZ

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of scientifically precise information about how and what consumers notice, feel, and remember, and what will motivate them to action, as neurological testing can.

Second, we don’t have perfect information about events that will happen in the future that will impact behavior. Fortunately, for the human race, we cannot and likely will never be able to predict behavior perfectly all the time. Thank goodness we can’t—life is much more interesting this way. However, we can use neuroscience to get closer to the truth of how people will feel and behave prospectively. That’s what we did for this client and the following is how we did it.

Brand Essence Study Synopsis

This particular brand is in the insurance field, a category with its own challenges. Consumers are averse to change and value security and trust above most other attributes. This is how the brand had appealed to their consumer base: as a very secure and trustworthy caretaker of one’s money and well-being. But their focus group findings hinted that there might be other attributes that consumers associated with this brand, attributes that were more personal and friendly than just security and safety. Even more important, several people who were close to the pulse of the consumer, especially the Chief Marketing Officer, had a gut feeling that this was true. But there wasn’t enough clarity or organizational alignment to move forward with a high degree of assurance into this new territory.