The Branded Mind. What neuroscience really tells us about the puzzle of the brain and the brand. Erikdu Plessis. KoganPage

Transcription

1 The Branded Mind What neuroscience really tells us about the puzzle of the brain and the brand Erikdu Plessis KoganPage LONDON PHILADELPHIA NEW DELHI

2 CONTENTS Foreword by Nigel Hollis xii About the author and contributors xiv Acknowledgements xvi PART ONE What it is all about 1 01 Introduction 3 The meta- and the micro-problem 4 Over-claiming 4 Emotions and feelings 5 Where does this leave us? 5 The puzzle 5 02 _ This book is about the consumer's brain 8 Why I wrote this book 8 Why do we make decisions? 10 How do people differ from animals on this view? 10 How does this happen in the brain? 11 How do we buy a brand? 11 Marketing practice 12 So what is this book about? The new paradigm 15 From Descartes to Damasio. 15 Who is Damasio? 16 Who was Descartes? 17 What is the paradigm shift that we are looking at? 18 Damasio's somatic marker theorem The brain - the coming together of disciplines 20 PART TWO The decision-making puzzle Interpretation, memory, experience, learning 25 Why the memory system is important 25 Feeling good, culture, personality and memories 26

3 The brain 26 Gestalts 33 What do artificial neural networks do very well? 36 Marketing implications of classifying and predicting 39 Interpretation, memory recall, 'comes to mind' Introducing the rat brain robot 42 Let's look at this robot rat 43 What brain systems does the robot rat need to be more like a human (or just more like a fruit fly)? 45 'Movere' is Latin for 'to move', 'to be motivated' 47 Move! But where to? Feelings 49 Why we need to understand feelings 49 From many gestalts to one: attention and touchpoints 50 Everybody knows what feelings, emotions and moods are - do the scientists? 54 Does it matter? 57 Definition used in this book 58 Time 59 The limbic system: the oldest part of the brain The 'feeling' brain systems and how they work 62 Reconciling this view with Damasio's view The environmental awareness system: emotions 66 An emotion is a post-rationalization 68 Rational or emotional? 70 But are advertisements like snakes? 70 Culture and the amygdala 71 Herd behaviour 71 How many emotions do we have? 72 Emotions and marketing i The 'state of body' system: homeostasis 76 Bio-measures and homeostasis The 'state of mind' system, or moods and arousal 81 Why the brain needs to control its levels of arousal 83 Mood and time 84

4 We continuously control our moods 84 Bio-measures, mood and arousal The evaluation system: pleasure 89 'Dopaminic memories' of brands 92 Bio-measures and dopamine Personality 94 Human 'personality' variation 94 What is personality? 95 It is not survival of the fittest, but death to the unfit 95 Personality and time 96 What does this have to do with brands? 97 Marketing 97 About brand personality 98 Bio-measures and personality Social systems and culture 100 The neuro-basis of culture 100 Why do we have an empathy circuit in the brain? 101 Prejudice 102 The marketing error resulting from the empathy system 103 Teaching feelings 104 What is culture? 104 Culture and time 107 Language 108 Oatley and Jenkins's view about culture and emotions 111 The global brand 112 Culture is much more than countries 112 Bio-measures and culture Gender differences 114 The male/female brain Let's put it all together 122 So how do we think we think? 122 'Thinking' involves a lot of brain process 123 Making a choice 124 A 'new' thought 125 Feelings and time 125

5 17 Measuring the brain 127 Single-cell measurement 128 Electroencephalography (EEG) 128 Magnetoencephalography (MEG) 129 Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) 130 Indirect measures of neural activity 130 Very indirect measurements of brain activity 131 'Reading' the measures 131 Creativity in designing brain scanning experiments Increasing our brainpower - using neuroscience effectively by Graham Page 133 The current state of play 134 Key questions to ask 135 Implicit association measurement 135 Eye-tracking 136 Brainwave measurement 138 Will neuroscience replace conventional research? 140 The future: integration 141 When should neuroscience-based techniques be used? Getting the best out of neuroscience 142 PART THREE Creating mischief On creating mischief 145 The Hidden Persuaders 145 'The seductive allure of neuroscience explanations' 147 The buy button 148 Sensationalism will increase Buy-ology 150 My view The elusive subconscious 152 j The big subconscious 152 The subconsciousness and religion 153 ** The confusion that arises when people willy-nilly talk about the subconsciousness 155 This is a personal belief 158 A justification for brain scanning projects? 158 What Freud said 159 Respondents lying and our ethics 159

6 PART FOUR Towards insights i6i 22 Read Montague's Pepsi Challenge 163 About Read Montague 164 The contribution of other sciences 165 Montague on culture Science: models and measurements 167 The homunculus 167 Decision making 167 Models and measurement 168 Models: the future 169 PART FIVE Some marketing implications 171 The marketing implications I chose 172 The build-up of the next five chapters Attention 175 Why it is an important topic 175 The issue 175 Studying for an exam or giving attention to an advertisement 177 Death of the 30-second ad? 178 Some empirical data 179 Why is this in a book about neuromarketing? 181 Inadvertent attention 182 The response curve and re-cognition 184 Re-cognition in non-fast-forwarded advertisements 185 Media strategy implications 185 Neuroscience and re-cognition (or repeat exposure) 186 Why repeat exposures to an advertisement? 190 But why does the level of awareness matter? 190 Can an advertisement have an effect without it being given attention? 192 The advertising effect of this 193 Du Plessis's error 194 Conclusions The brand soma 197 What I mean by the brand soma 197 The brand soma and functionality 198 Neurology 199

7 What does the brand soma do? 199 Brand soma, rationality and functionality 199 Fishbein and brand utility 202 How the brand soma works in practice 203 How this shows in perceptual maps 204 Revisiting Fishbein 204 The dopamine moment 204 'How would using the brand make you feel?' 205 Using the halo effect Consumer decision making as heuristics 207 What is a heuristic? 207 Neuromarketing and heuristics 207 Feelings and heuristics 209 BrandDynamics 209 Different people have different heuristics in different situations 211 Heuristics and questionnaire design 212 Where does this lead us (marketers)? Market segmentation 215 Good segmentation should not be like this 217 Some suggestions about segmentation studies 219 Neuromarketing and segmentation 221 Segmentation and neural studies - a chocolate examplie Advertising budget, brand life cycle, synapses and brand soma 223 Setting the budget 224 Peter Field and AC Nielsen 224 The dynamic difference model 226 Implications for 'percentage of revenue' budget 227 This is a big ask of the brand 229 Brand life cycles 229 Jones's advertising intensity curve 231 Brand life cycle: a self-fulfilling belief? 232 Optimizing advertising budgets 232 The changing pieces of the puzzle 233

8 PART six My conclusions What this was all about 237 From very small things to very big things Is the future what it was? 241 What the future will bring 241 Summary implications for neuromarketing 244 References 245 Index 247