Brighter Marketing

I  was reading the Sunday Times a few weeks ago and came across a great article “Now the buyer must beware” about a chap called Martin Lindstrom a 38 year advertising guru who has given over the last two years of his life to working out why people buy the products they do. Rather than ask customers why they buy, he scanned and wired up hundreds of his volunteers brains so that he could observe which parts of the brain reacted in response to different products and questions. The result… that our subconscious does most of the decision-making.

One of his main findings is that, he seems to have proved that no matter what gruesome images the government plans to put on cigarette packages, it will have little or no effect on reducing the number of people smoking. Why? because the same part of the brain, the nucleus accumbens that deals with addiction and reward, lights up when the subjects where shown “Smoking Kills” packs; effectively wiping the effect it is supposed to have.

All this was music to my ears, why? Because Siobhan and I have known and been banging on to anyone who would listen for years, that people buy emotionally not logically, but never had any real science to back it up, until now that is. So halfway through the article I was already logging onto Amazon to buy his book “Buy-ology: How everything we believe about why we buy is wrong” to get the inside track on how the new science of neuromarketing works. And so far I haven’t been disappointed.

I am about halfway through the book and it would appear that he has developed some amazing insights into how the human brain works when buying things. Some people say that if we know this kind of stuff then it could be used unethically to get people to buy things they don’t really want, but if you take time to understand the subject, it is more a fascinating study into how the human mind works. It confirms our belief that even in the business to business world there is more to a buying decision than pure logic and that if you appeal to a buyer’s emotion in your marketing material then you can you have a much better chance of getting them to respond to your marketing messages.

To read the article visit: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article5061422.ece

To get a copy of his book, “Buy-ology: How everything we believe about why we buy is wrong” then you can find it on Amazon just click on the link in the in our recommended book links on the right.

To take a look at our take on emotion in marketing why not take a look at our article on our main website, just visit http://www.brightermarketing.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=94