Buyology: How Everything We Believe About Why We Buy is Wrong - Couverture souple

Not surprisingly, the smokers were on edge, fidgety, not sure what to expect.

Barely noticing the rain and overcast skies, they clumped together outside the medical building in London, England, that houses the Centre for NeuroImaging Sciences. Some were self- described social smokers–a cigarette in the morn­ing, a second snuck in during lunch hour, maybe half-a- dozen more if they went out carousing with their friends at night. Others confessed to being longtime two-pack-a-day addicts. All of them pledged their allegiance to a single brand, whether it was Marlboros or Camels. Under the rules of the study, they knew they wouldn’t be allowed to smoke for the next four hours, so they were busy stockpiling as much tar and nicotine inside their systems as they could. In between drags, they swapped lighters, matches, smoke rings, apprehensions: Will this hurt? George Orwell would love this. Do you think the machine will be able to read my mind?

Inside the building, the setting was, as befits a medical lab­oratory, antiseptic, no- nonsense, and soothingly soulless–all cool white corridors and flannel gray doors. As the study got under way I took a perch behind a wide glass window inside a cockpit-like control booth among a cluster of desks, digital equipment, three enormous computers, and a bunch of white-smocked researchers. I was looking over a room domi­nated by an fMRI (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) scanner, an enormous, $4 million machine that looks like a gi­ant sculpted doughnut, albeit one with a very long, very hard tongue. As the most advanced brain- scanning technique avail­able today, fMRI measures the magnetic properties of hemo­globin, the components in red blood cells that carry oxygen around the body. In other words, fMRI measures the amount of oxygenated blood throughout the brain and can pinpoint an area as small as one millimeter (that’s 0.03937 of an inch). You see, when a brain is operating on a specific task, it de­mands more fuel–mainly oxygen and glucose. So the harder a region of the brain is working, the greater its fuel consump­tion, and the greater the flow of oxygenated blood will be to that site. So during fMRI, when a portion of the brain is in use, that region will light up like a red-hot flare. By tracking this activation, neuroscientists can determine what specific ar­eas in the brain are working at any given time.
Neuroscientists traditionally use this 32-ton, SUV-sized in­strument to diagnose tumors, strokes, joint injuries, and other medical conditions that frustrate the abilities of X-rays and CT scans. Neuropsychiatrists have found fMRI useful in shed­ding light on certain hard-to-treat psychiatric conditions, in­cluding psychosis, sociopathy, and bipolar illness. But those smokers puffing and chatting and pacing in the waiting room weren’t ill or in any kind of distress. Along with a similar sam­ple of smokers in the United States, they were carefully cho­sen participants in a groundbreaking neuromarketing study who were helping me get to the bottom–or the brain–of a mystery that had been confounding health professionals, cig­arette companies, and smokers and nonsmokers alike for decades.

For a long time, I’d noticed how the prominently placed health warnings on cigarette boxes seemed to have bizarrely little, if any, effect on smokers. Smoking causes fatal lung cancer. Smoking causes emphysema. Smoking while pregnant causes birth defects. Fairly straightforward stuff. Hard to argue with. And those are just the soft- pedaled American warnings. European cigarette makers place their warnings in coal-black, Magic Marker—thick frames, making them even harder to miss. In Portugal, dwarf­ing the dromedary on Camel packs, are words even a kid could understand: Fumar Mata. Smoking kills. But nothing comes even close to the cigarette warnings from Canada, Thailand, Australia, Brazil–and soon the U.K. They’re gorily, forensi­cally true-to-life, showing full- color images of lung tumors, gangrenous feet and toes, and the open sores and disintegrat­ing teeth that accompany mouth and throat cancers.
You’d think these graphic images would stop most smok­ers in their tracks. So why, in 2006, despite worldwide tobacco advertising bans, outspoken and frequent health warnings from the medical community, and massive government in­vestment in antismoking campaigns, did global consumers continue to smoke a whopping 5,763 billion cigarettes, a fig­ure which doesn’t include duty-free cigarettes, or the huge in­ternational black market trade? (I was once in an Australian convenience store where I overheard the clerk asking a smoker, “Do you want the pack with the picture of the lungs, the heart, or the feet?” How often did this happen, I asked the clerk? Fifty percent of the time that customers asked for cig­arettes, he told me.) Despite what is now known about smok­ing, it’s estimated that about one-third of adult males across the globe continue to light up. Approximately 15 billion ciga­rettes are sold every day–that’s 10 million cigarettes sold a minute. In China, where untold millions of smokers believe that cigarettes can cure Parkinson’s disease, relieve symptoms of schizophrenia, boost the efficacy of brain cells, and im­prove their performance at work, over 300 million people,1 including 60 percent of all male doctors, smoke. With annual sales of 1.8 trillion cigarettes, the Chinese monopoly is re­sponsible for roughly one-third of all cigarettes being smoked on earth today2–a large percentage of the 1.4 billion people using tobacco, which, according to World Bank projections, is expected to increase to roughly 1.6 billion by 2025 (though China consumes more cigarettes than the United States, Rus­sia, Japan, and Indonesia combined).
In the Western world, nicotine addiction still ranks as an enormous concern. Smoking is the biggest killer in Spain today, with fifty thousand smoking- related deaths annually. In the U.K., roughly one-third of all adults under the age of sixty-five light up, while approximately 42 percent of people under sixty-five are exposed to tobacco smoke at home.3 Twelve times more British people have died from smoking than died in World War II. According to the American Lung Association, smoking- related diseases affect roughly 438,000 American lives a year, “including those affected indirectly, such as babies born prematurely due to prenatal maternal smoking and victims of ‘secondhand’ exposure to tobacco’s carcinogens.” The health-care costs in the United States alone? Over $167 billion a year.4 And yet cigarette companies keep coming up with innovative ways to kill us. For example, Philip Morris’s latest weapon against workplace smoking bans is Marlboro Intense, a smaller, high-tar cigarette–seven puffs worth–that can be consumed in stolen moments in between meetings, phone calls, and PowerPoint presentations.5

It makes no sense. Are smokers selectively blind to warn­ing labels? Do they think, to a man or a woman, Yes, but I’m the exception here? Are they showing the world some giant act of bravado? Do they secretly believe they are immortal? Or do they know the health dangers and just not care?
That’s what I was hoping to use fMRI technology to find out. The thirty-two smokers in today’s study? They were among the 2,081 volunteers from America, England, Ger­many, Japan, and the Republic of China that I’d enlisted for the largest, most revolutionary neuromarketing experiment in history.
It was twenty-five times larger than any neuromarketing study ever before attempted. Using the most cutting-edge sci­entific tools available, it revealed the hidden truths behind how branding and marketing messages work on the human brain, how our truest selves react to stimuli at a level far deeper than conscious thought, and how our unconscious minds control our behavior (usually the opposite of how we think we behave). In other words, I’d set off on a quest to in­vestigate some of the biggest puzzles and issues facing con­sumers, businesses, advertisers, and governments today.

For example, does product placement really work? (The answer, I found out, is a qualified no.) How powerful are brand logos? (Fragrance and sound are more potent than any logo alone.) Does subliminal advertising still take place? (Yes, and it probably influenced what you picked up at the conve­nience store the other day.) Is our buying behavior affected by the world’s major religions? (You bet, and increasingly so.) What effect do disclaimers and health warnings have on us? (Read on.) Does sex in advertising work (not really) and how could it possibly get more explicit than it is now? (You just watch.)
Beginning in 2004, from start to finish, our study took up nearly three years of my life, cost approximately $7 million (provided by eight multinational companies), comprised mul­tiple experiments, and involved thousands of subjects from across the globe, as well as two hundred researchers, ten professors and doctors, and an ethics committee. And it em­ployed two of the most sophisticated brain- scanning instru­ments in the world: the fMRI and an advanced version of the electroencephalograph known as the SST, short for steady-state typography, which tracks rapid brain waves in real time. The research team was overseen by Dr. Gemma Calvert, who holds the Chair in Applied Neuroimaging at the University of Warwick, England, and is the founder of Neurosense in Ox­ford, and Professor Richard Silberstein, the CEO of Neuro-Insight in Australia. And the results? Well, all I’ll say for now is that they’ll transform the way you think about how and why you buy.
Marlene, one of the smokers in the study, took her place lying flat on her back inside the fMRI. The machine made a lit­tle ticking sound as the platform rose and locked into place. Marlene looked a little hesitant–who wouldn’t?–but man­aged a gung-ho smile as a technician placed the protective head coil over most of her face in preparation for the first brain scan of the day.

From Marlene’s pretesting questionnaire and interview, I knew she was a recently divorced mother of two from Mid­dlesex, and that she’d started smoking at boarding school fif­teen years earlier. She thought of herself less as a nicotine addict than a “party smoker,” that is, she smoked just a couple of “small” cigarettes during the day, as well as eight to ten more at night.

“Are you affected by the warnings on cigarette packs?” the questionnaire had asked.

“Yes,” Marlene had written, twirling her pen around in her fingers as though she was about to ignite the thing.

“Are you smoking less as a consequence of these?”

Another yes. More pen-spinning. I’ve never been a smoker, but I felt for her.

Her interview answers were clear enough, but now it was time to interview her brain. For those who’ve never had an MRI, it’s not what I’d call the most relaxing or enjoyable ex­perience in the world. The machine is clankingly noisy, lying perfectly still is tedious, and if you’re at all prone to panic or claustrophobia, it can feel as if you’re being buried alive in a phone booth. Once inside, it’s best you remain in a state of yogic calm. Breathe. In, out, in again. You’re free to blink and swallow, but you better ignore that itch on your left calf if it kills you. A tic, a jiggle, a fidget, a grimace, body twitching– the slightest movement at all and the results can be compro­mised. Wedding bands, bracelets, necklaces, nose rings, or tongue studs have to be taken off beforehand, as well. Thanks to the machine’s rapacious magnet, any scrap of metal would rip off so fast you wouldn’t know what just belted you in the eye.

Marlene was in the scanner for a little over an hour. A small reflective apparatus resembling a car’s rearview mirror pro­jected a series of cigarette warning labels from various angles, one after another, on a nearby screen. Asked to rate her desire to smoke during this slideshow, Marlene signaled her re­sponses by pressing down on what’s known as a button box– a small black console resembling a hand-sized accordion–as each image flashed by.

We continued to perform brain scans on new subjects over the next month and a half.

Five weeks later, the team leader, Dr. Calvert, presented me with the results. I was, to put it mildly, startled. Even Dr. Calvert was taken aback by the findings: warning labels on the sides, fronts, and backs of cigarette packs had no effect on suppressing the smokers’ cravings at all. Zero. In other words, all those gruesome photographs, government regulations, bil­lions of dollars some 123 countries had invested in nonsmok­ing campaigns, all amounted, at the end of a day, to, well, a big waste of money.

“Are you sure?” I kept saying.

“Pretty damn certain,” she replied, adding that the statisti­cal validity was as solid as could be.

But this wasn’t half as amazing as what Dr. Calvert discov­ered once she analyzed the results further. Cigarette warn­ings–whether they informed smokers they were at risk of contracting emphysema, heart disease, or a host of other chronic conditions–had in fact stimulated an area of the smokers’ brains called the nucleus accumbens, otherwise known as “the craving spot.” This region is a chain-link of specialized neurons that lights up when the body desires something–whether it’s alcohol, drugs, tobacco, sex, or gam­bling. When stimulated, the nucleus accumbens requires higher and higher doses to get its fix.

In short, the fMRI results showed that cigarette warning la­bels not only failed to deter smoking, but by activating the nu­cleus accumbens, it appeared they actually encouraged smokers to light up. We couldn’t help but conclude that those same cig­arette warning labels intended to curb smoking, reduce cancer, and save lives had instead become a killer marketing tool for the tobacco industry.

Most of the smokers checked off yes when they were asked if warning labels worked–maybe because they thought it was the right answer, or what the researchers wanted to hear, or maybe because they felt guilty about what they knew smok­ing was doing to their health. But as Dr. Calvert concluded later, it wasn’t that our volunteers felt ashamed about what smoking was doing to their bodies; they felt guilty that the la­bels stimulated their brains’ craving areas. It was just that their conscious minds couldn’t tell the difference. Marlene hadn’t been lying when she filled out her questionnaire. But her brain–the ultimate no-bullshit zone–had adamantly contra­dicted her. Just as our brains do to each one of us every single day.

The results of the additional brain scan studies I carried out were just as provocative, fascinating, and controversial as the cigarette research project. One by one, they brought me closer to a goal I’d set out to accomplish: to overturn some of the most long-held assumptions, myths, and beliefs about what kinds of advertising, branding, and packaging actually work to arouse our interest and encourage us to buy. If I could help uncover the subconscious forces that stimulate our interest and ultimately cause us to open our wallets, the brain-scan study would be the most important three years of my life.
By way of profession, I’m a global branding expert. That is, it’s been a lifelong mi...

Anti-smoking campaigns unwittingly encourage people to smoke. Product placement in films rarely works. Many multi-million pound advertising campaigns are a complete waste of time. Subliminal advertising may have been banned but it's all around us. Our brains respond to brands in almost exactly the same way as they respond to religion.

These are just a few of the findings of Martin Lindstrom's groundbreaking
study of what really makes us, the consumers, tick. Convinced that there is a gulf
between what we believe influences us and what actually does, he set up a
highly ambitious research project that employed the very latest in
brain-scanning technology and called on the services of some 2000 volunteers.
Buy-ology shares the fruits of this research, revealing for the first time
what actually goes on inside our heads when we see an advertisement, hear a
marketing slogan, taste two rival brands of drink, or watch a programme
sponsored by a major company. The conclusions are both startling and
groundbreaking, showing the extent to which we deceive ourselves when we
think we are making rational choices, and revealing factors as varied as
childhood memories, religious belief, even our sense of smell, that come
together to influence our decisions and shape our tastes.