Martin Lindstrom, a 38-year-old advertising sage, is unusual in his profession
for openly loathing the tobacco industry. Which is a shame because it just
adores him. Fourteen times in the past two years the cigarette giants have
come knocking on his door to beg for his services.
Why? Because Lindstrom, a pint-sized Dane with a curiously high-pitched voice,
has the power to make us smoke. His tool is neuro-marketing — or looking
directly into our brains — a practice that has hitherto been viewed as
bordering on the unethical. Now, with the credit crunch beginning to bite,
it increasingly looks like a necessary corporate survival tactic.
The branding guru and futurologist has just published Buyology: How Everything
We Believe About Why We Buy is Wrong — based on his four-year £1m worldwide
probe into our grey matter. Rigged up to fMRI (functional magnetic resonance
imagers) scanners, his subjects have images of chocolate bars and fag
packets flashed before their eyes while Lindstrom and his team observe how
various parts of their brains light up in response. What he has proved is
that our subconscious does most of the decision-making.
“We should not fool ourselves into thinking that we’re in control — we’re
not,” he says. “In fact, the more rational a person believes himself to be,
the less likely that he will be in control of his choices.”
Do you, for example, prefer the taste of Pepsi but always buy Coke? Or swear
blind that you’ll vote Conservative but opt for Labour on election day?
Lindstrom — and his scanner — can tell you why. (More worryingly, he can use
the information to push your “buy buttons” for the companies that hire him.)
Having set up his first advertising agency at 12 (it defies belief, but he had
both employees and clients), he now travels round the world 300 days of the
year and is paid millions to dispense his advice to Disney, Nestlé and
Microsoft. But Philip Morris or Imperial Tobacco? He tells them to sod off —
“Basically because I don’t like smoking,” he tells me when I catch up with
him in Zurich. Just as well: in the wrong hands his expertise could be
devastating.
One of Lindstrom’s studies, conducted in Britain, attempted to explain why the
number of smokers has gone up since the ban on advertising and the
introduction of health warnings on cigarette packets. When he showed his
test subjects pictures of cigarettes, their nucleus accumbens — the area of
the brain that deals with addiction and reward — predictably started to
buzz. Then he showed them anti-smoking messages — and they provoked the same
cravings.
Apparently, when faced with the message “Smoking kills”, our subconscious just
cuts straight to the craving. “Most anti-smoking messages,” he concludes,
“are no better than adverts for cigarettes.”
Equally disturbing, Lindstrom has discovered that addicts get a craving even
when shown simple images of Ferraris or cowboys. Indeed, Philip Morris has
already begun to use this technique — paying some bar owners, for example,
to kit out rooms in the colours of its Marlboro brand, with furniture
suggestive of the packet design and televisions running landscapes of cowboy
country on a loop.
In another study, the most potent brain zone for consumer motivation was the
amygdala, where we register fear, anxiety and dread. It’s particularly
useful for political campaigns and, if you hit it right, as the Conservative
party did in 1979 with its “Labour isn’t working” slogan, it will wipe out
all the nuances of debate and get you elected.
Within five years, Lindstrom estimates, a quarter of the money that UK
advertisers spend on research — some £250m annually — will be spent on
neuro-marketing. The sinister element is that once a company or political
party understands your subconscious better than you do, you can be
manipulated.
Lindstrom’s critics call his work “Orwellian”; even he concedes that it’s a
thorny area: “The reason why neuro-marketing has not kicked in before is
because, from an ethical point of view, companies have not wanted to go
there. But I wanted to find out how far we can go.”
How far is that exactly? “We cannot go as far as we fear. We cannot — thank
God — brainwash consumers, plant a ‘buy’ button in people’s brains. What we
can do is look into our subconscious mind and see what affects us and how
strongly.” And then use that to target sales? “Well, yes . . .”
One of the key reasons humans are such mad shoppers is dopamine, a
euphoria-inducing hormone released by the brain that induces a feeling of
security and self-righteousness when we hand over a credit card. Lindstrom
pinpoints it as the reason people were happy to borrow four times their
salaries to buy houses or stick £900 handbags on a store card. He even says
that stockbrokers were chasing a dopamine high when trading, pushing stocks
up and up. Greed was our addiction; looming recession is our self-induced
come-down.
That does not mean we’ll give up all our dopamine highs. The luxury-goods
market will fall, he predicts, but sales of fast food will go up; we’ll take
fewer holidays but spend more on televisions, DVDs (particularly romantic
comedies) and nostalgia items such as flowery aprons and board games (like
Scrabble) because they remind us of childhood and help us to feel cosy and
secure as the world crumbles.
How are the big brands going to sell to us? This is where, frankly, we should
be a little afraid. For a start, our relationships with some brands are more
intense than we realise. In 2006 nuns of various ages were put under an fMRI
scanner and asked for their fondest memories of God. Unsurprisingly, the
caudate nucleus (joy, serenity, self-awareness) and insula (which apparently
registers a feeling of being linked to the divine) both lit up like
Christmas trees.
This pattern was thought to be unique to religion — until last year, when
Lindstrom saw his subjects’ brains respond in the same way to brand logos
such as Harley-Davidson, Guinness and Apple.
That shopping is the new religion is a creaky old cliché. “Now it seems more
like scientific fact,” he says. Armed with a scanner and a test group, a
corporation can begin to devise sales pitches that light up your “God
buttons” and “buy buttons” simultaneously.
One of the best examples is Coca-Cola. For years it was not understood why
tasters said they preferred Pepsi to Coke but then bought Coke. Lindstrom
cites an fMRI study showing that Pepsi activates the ventral putamen in the
majority of consumers, which gets stimulated when we find tastes appealing.
But with Coke there is additional activity in the medial prefrontal cortex —
the region dedicated to higher thinking and discernment. One sip and our
brains flood with memories of happy childhoods and Christmas.
With a better understanding of its brand’s pull, Coca-Cola can get more
creative in how to grab us. Indeed, Lindstrom conducted a test in the United
States to prove how effective product placement can be.
Along with Ford and AT&T, the mobile phone company, Coca-Cola is one of three
principal sponsors of American Idol, the country’s top-rated TV show.
While the firms each pay more than $30m annually to run advertisements
around the programme, Coca-Cola has woven itself into the action.
Simon Cowell sits at his judging table sipping Coke, and the firm’s signature
red is embedded in the set design. The result? No one remembers Ford after
the show — we switch off when we are being “advertised” to — but our
yearning for a hit of sugary caffeine is sky high.
To be fair, this kind of advertising has been around since MGM movie stars
were paid to smoke specific cigarette brands on screen in the 1930s. But it
is set to rise exponentially. In 20 years, Lindstrom suggests, Piccadilly
Circus in London could be free from neon billboards: “Instead, the streets
will be awash with smells and sounds. A whiff of lemon from a store selling
a must-have training shoe, clingy perfume wafting from the doors of a
hotel.” We already know that fast-food restaurants pump out artificial
scents, but the trend is set to rise.
The fear button is also going to prove key. Previously we were sold organic
and environmentally friendly products on the basis of their homespun natural
goodness. Now that we’re less inclined to put our hands in our pockets for
the feelgood factor, brands will resort to scaring us. “They will tell you
to buy an energy-saving light bulb if you want your children to have any
quality of life,” says Lindstrom.
Within a few years, he predicts, brain-mapping our political desires will be
commonplace, too. Who, I ask, does he neuro-instinctively think will win the
US election?
“Hate it or love it, McCain could still win. First, a lot of votingis
taking place in the churches. If there is a large cross hanging over you
while you vote, you may not register it but it will have an influence on you
to vote Republican.
“Second, we have done some studies that show some people, sadly, are
non-verbally hard-wired to think that a black face is bad and a white face
is good.
"Obama will need his big lead, because there will be a substantial
subconscious swing to McCain on election day.”
What does he make of Gordon Brown’s plight?
“He is a little bit more appealing to people in a crisis. He’s like Winston
Churchill in a way, though the British people didn’t want Churchill once the
war was over.”
If Brown hired him, Lindstrom would hook up the brains of a test group to a
scanner, bombard them with images of Churchill and see what lobes lit up:
“Then we’d build a message based on whether we want Brown to scare us, be
confident or to emotionally engage us. Maybe he doesn’t know himself right
now.”
With nine volunteers and two fMRI machines, Lindstrom claims he definitely
would know — and he would be able to advise Brown exactly which of our
buttons to press.
Buyology by Martin Lindstrom is published by Random House at £17.99. Copies
can be ordered for £16.19, including postage, from The Sunday Times
BooksFirst on 0870 165 8585
