The Buying Brain: Secrets for Selling to the Subconscious Mind (38 page)

You already know from reading above in this chapter about the important role that information plays in creating a superior shopping experience.

Figure 15.1

Occlusion

Source:
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As I said, from a neurological perspective,
occlusion can actually work
to intrigue the brain.
It’s a simplified visual puzzle—and the brain loves solving simple puzzles, especially visual ones.

For certain signage—such as that in quick service restaurants’ menu boards—partially obscuring one product behind another can not only save precious messaging space, but it can attract the brain’s interest. The eye might linger just a little bit longer, trying to uncover the partially hidden image.

When it does, there’s a small neurological reward—we applaud ourselves for solving the mystery.

But in other situations, such as the ones discovered in our midnight video expedition, occlusion can work against everyone’s best interests. If you make something too difficult for the brain, you run the risk of causing the subconscious to rule against the further expenditure of precious neurological resources in an attempt to sort it all out to our satisfaction.

In a quick-service restaurant setting, the subconscious can fairly readily infer from the partial product seen what the actual product is. There are enough clues to enable that. But in another retail setting, the brain may be unable to decipher easily what the remainder of the partially occluded message is, especially if it’s to do with numbers. In that kind of circumstance, the brain simply writes off devoting any extra effort to attempt to figure it all out. Your expensive, time-intensive signage efforts were just for naught.

Video Here, There, and Everywhere

It’s now a cliché to talk about the universality of video in our lives. We’re living that reality daily. And, as noted, it’s become more commonplace in the retail world. Screens are surfacing everywhere from shopping carts to shelves and escalators to checkout counters.

So the questions arise:
how effective is this medium in this medium?

And what are some neurological best practices that marketers can follow to maximize their investment in video messaging?

Starting with the “big picture” and moving on to more specifics: as a neurological rule of thumb, simply running existing TV commercials on in-store screens is generally not as effective as conventional wisdom would have it. In-store video should be developed to stimulate purchase and consumption.

Unlike your living room, the retail environment is already saturated with stimuli for the subconscious. Your body is in motion, all five of your senses are in more active modes (although sight and hearing are certainly stimulated watching TV at home), there are multiple competing sources of incoming P1: OTA/XYZ

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data (other shoppers, and the PA system, squeaky cart wheels, and so on). The net effect is that apportioning/rationing of cognitive resources as have been discussed. The brain budgets.

TV commercials usually demand that we follow some sort of story line, often with multiple characters. They are designed and executed with the idea (the hope!) that the viewer will be devoting most or all of their attention more or less continuously to the message. They frequently depend on our witnessing specific scenes, or hearing specific lines spoken.

The in-store environment conspires against all of that. We are not static, we are moving. Our attention is attracted in several directions at once. We are in a social setting, with strangers present, not in our homes by ourselves or with just our families.

In-store video messaging must, therefore, basically be different in its conception and execution in order to adapt best to this more difficult environment.

r
Visual continuity is less important than visual content.
What I mean by that is that individual scenes should be the focus, and less so the “framework” within which they are presented. The great likelihood is that the shopper will only glimpse a portion of the video at any one time. If the video is looped, they may experience more of it as they shop through the store, but approach production with the mindset that you may only be able to communicate via single scenes.

r The brain will retain imagery and other content that it deems worth devoting attention and memory capacity to, up to a point. So making individual scenes as self-contained, impactful, and memorable as possible is more important than it might be in creating footage for a typical TV spot.

r
Portraying people is a priority.
Elsewhere you’ve read how the brain is fundamentally drawn to the human face. We seek community and interaction. We need to recognize other members of our species. In a hectic, crowded retail environment, where demands are continuously being made on our subconscious, the familiar/reassuring image of human faces anchors us.

r
Semantics suffer.
Unless you communicate in single words or extremely brief/concise phrases, the use of semantics in store videos is likely to be a waste. The chances that a shopper will see them in the first place are greatly diminished from what would normally be the case in the home. Neurologically speaking, unless we can connect semantics with some other information (visual and/or aural), in and of themselves those P1: OTA/XYZ

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semantics will probably not succeed in earning the allocation of valuable cognitive resources by the brain.

r
Music and more matters.
While visual stimuli are accorded priority status by the brain, audio information is hardly overlooked. In fact, in the stimulus-rich-environment of a store, the ability to capture the brain’s attention with music or sound effects becomes more of a priority than it would be in the home setting. This is one category where borrowing already established musical phrases or “branded” sound effects from commercials can pay synergistic benefits.

The Measured Miles: In-Store

Neurological Testing

Consider the figure 46,800. It turns out that’s a very interesting and important number when it comes to supermarket shopping.

Actually, it’s two numbers, slightly different, that I’ve combined to make my point. And here’s what it is:

r The median average supermarket size is
46,755 square feet
.

r The average number of items in a supermarket is
46,852
.

That is a lot of goods in a lot of space. The prospect of having to ask consumers what they’re thinking, what they’re looking at, what’s attracting their attention, what’s engaging their emotions, and what they’re remembering all while they’re pushing along through 46,755 square feet, surrounded by 46,852 individual items . . . well, you see where I’m going.

You
couldn’t answer accurately.
I
couldn’t answer accurately.
Nobody
could answer accurately. Nevertheless, this is the cathedral of commerce. This is where all the new product concepts, the packaging designs, the marketing campaigns, the displays, and the slotting fees have to pay off—in sales.

So it’s critical to find out
what
consumers are reacting to, and
how
they’re reacting.

Because $547.1 billion dollars are riding on it (that’s the latest annual total of
supermarket sales).

Neurological testing is the solution. The brain will tell us the answers to all those questions—in real time, with pinpoint accuracy. There are two ways to measure the brain’s responses to the actual shopping experience.

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r
In-store EEG testing

One of the great advantages of EEG-based neurological testing is the fact that the equipment is easily adapted for
portability/mobility.
We can capture the same brainwave activity in the linguini section as we do in the laboratory.

A test subject can stroll the aisles and shop just as they normally would. All the while, EEG sensors acquire brainwave activity at 2,000 times a second, across multiple regions of the brain, and that data is recorded on a portable hard drive for processing and analysis.

Simultaneously, eye-tracking equipment is capturing the shopper’s precise focal location, enabling the brainwave data being gathered to be matched with exactly what they were looking at, at any given millisecond.

But what if, for any number of reasons, there is a need to measure shoppers’

neurological responses outside the actual store environment? Perhaps it’s a need for repeated passes down a number of aisles. Perhaps it’s because a client wishes to alter certain aspects of the shopping experience, to determine consumers’

different reactions, and to attempt to do so with real shoppers in a real store setting would be prohibitively time-consuming/expensive.

In those circumstances, there is a fascinating alternative: r
Video Realistic Technology

Digital technology has advanced to the point where the in-store shopping experience can be replicated, with startling realism, without a test subject ever having to step foot inside an actual store.

Video Realistic methodology allows subjects to push a virtual shopping cart down virtual aisles, all the while scanning virtual products on virtual shelves.

But the technology doesn’t stop there.

Shoppers can pause and pick up products, examine them on all sides, and replace them on the shelf. The high-definition video codec enables a subject to read the fine print on a label, experience the rich colors of the packaging, or see the smile on the face of the infant on the bottle of apple juice.

It is
a fully immersive shopping experience, without the store.
The brain responds in the same fundamental ways that it would in an actual retail setting. From a neurological perspective, the stimuli are much the same: the aisle looks real, the shelves are stocked, and the package looks like a real package. Everything is in the correct scale. Even other shoppers are in place.

The tactile sense is not the same—the subject doesn’t feel the weight of the package, for example—but for most market research purposes, that exception isn’t a mission-critical one.

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The flexibility of Video Realistic is one of its greatest virtues. Store environments can be changed with a few keystrokes. Packages can be moved, substituted, altered in any way desired. Displays can be changed, signage can be shifted—this attribute and others makes Video Realistic a very viable alternative, and increasing numbers of marketers are discovering its value.

The Resolution: Delight the Mind

with Soft and Soothing Designs

For our cookie/cake mix client considering a new placement of products, we tested several different end cap designs, ranging from traditional, square end caps to newer, rounded-end caps. We paid particular attention to the Emotional Engagement scores that each generated. We found that the rounded end caps incorporating natural elements and imagery reflecting a “home-looking” design worked best. What the client had hoped to do was to create a layout creating the impression of two particular products together in a pleasant, homey kitchen, without spending a fortune on materials and square footage, and it worked. Not only did sales go up for the featured product on the end cap, sales went up for their entire category.

3D Matrix

Fresh out of our laboratories is a technology we call 3D Matrix. In the post-Avatar world, 3D will become more and more the norm for the consumer experience, and therefore increasingly so for the market research field. Glasses and touch gloves enable our test subjects to experience starting levels of perceived reality.

Future Shopping

What can neurological testing tell us about the future of retail, and in-store marketing? There are lines that we can draw out over the horizon, starting with what we know about the brain and how it functions—what it likes and doesn’t like.

We know
the brain delights in novelty
. As humans, we are predisposed to seek out the new. So retail environments could benefit from fresh designs, new applications of lighting, sound, and textures, innovative ways of P1: OTA/XYZ

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presenting merchandise. For example, we know that
the brain dislikes
straight lines
—so a creative retailer might decide to design a store setting that emphasizes curves rather than hard angles.

We know that
the brain prefers natural textures over artificial textures
. Technology is likely to bring us advances in synthetic materials that almost perfectly mimic their real, organic sources of inspiration.

We know that
the brain assigns priority to our sense of sight
. So expect to see much more use of video and other moving images in the retail setting.

My prediction is that as marketers and retailers become more knowledgeable about neurological testing and realize its potential, they will also come to appreciate and apply the power of neuromarketing methods like Neurological Iconic Signatures.