Buyology lesson

Four or five years ago, brain science seemed to be promising a revolution in market research, with a scramble for a mythical ‘buy button’ in the brain.

Needless to say the button hasn’t been found. More and more firms are at least experimenting with neuroscience and other biometric research techniques, but we’re some way short of a revolution.

In the intervening period branding consultant Martin Lindstrom has been working on his latest book, Buyology, which he’s now hoping will reignite the debate. It seems to be having some success – the book is a New York Times bestseller and has won Lindstrom plenty of media coverage.

Buyology is based on a groundbreaking $7m brain-scanning study involving 2000 volunteers and conducted with neuroscientists from the University of Oxford. At first glance it looks like a great leap forward for neuromarketing, but not everyone is convinced.

Lindstrom’s claims about why we buy are provocative: he says that anti-smoking campaigns actually encourage smoking, that product placement doesn’t work, and that sex doesn’t sell after all. To give the book the widest possible appeal, he has made the conclusions stark and the science simple.

As director of innovation for Millward Brown, Graham Page has been keeping tabs on the neuroscience scene for some time. When Research asked him for his response to Buyology, he said: “There’s some great science in there but I think Martin has cherry-picked the anecdotes. It’s a stimulating read, but the reality is perhaps slightly less clear-cut than he would suggest.”

In the book, Lindstrom sets out his stall against ‘traditional’ market research, which he argues is not up to the task of working out what people really think and feel. But Page says that when you delve beyond the headline conclusions, much of what Lindstrom concludes is in fact quite consistent with existing research.

Perhaps more interesting than what Buyology reveals about why we buy is what it tells us about the state of neuromarketing. Lindstrom says he wants to restart a debate that died out because of fear of an ethical backlash, and a threat to the MR industry’s established practices.

Fulfilling the promise
Steve Phillips, founder and MD of Spring Research, said: “I’m a big fan of investigation in neuroscience. I think it will show us new things, but at the moment it’s not living up to its hype and I thought that was illustrated quite well in this book.”

Phillips believes a good understanding of psychology is more useful in research than any flashy brain science. He rejects the idea that the industry hasn’t addressed subconscious decision-making, although he welcomes the book as “a slap in the face” for those who rely too much on conventional techniques. Page is a little more defensive. He says: “The argument that you can’t ask people why they do stuff is probably right. But that’s why most market research doesn’t.”

London-based Conquest Research uses surveys based on visual metaphors to get around the problem of people trying (and failing) to verbalise their emotions. Managing director David Penn said: “My reaction when I first found out about this book was surprise, because I thought we’d had that debate. He’s pitching it to people for whom neuromarketing is a new thing.”

Penn argues that you don’t have to scan people’s brains to get at their emotions. “I agree with Lindstrom’s premise that you can’t get at a lot of what’s going on through conscious response, because people don’t know what they know – I totally buy into that. It’s what you do about it that’s the big issue. The view we take is that you can still work with conscious response because a lot of emotions show up there.”

He questions whether brain science tells us much that other methods don’t, or simply “makes retrospective sense of our old intuitive practices”. Read Montague’s Coke v Pepsi experiment of 2004, which Lindstrom cites, would seem to be an example of the latter – the results, although fascinating, do little more than restate, in a new language,
what was already clear about the two brands.

One point on which everyone agrees with Lindstrom is that neuroscience can only work alongside survey research, since the only way to link physiological readings to emotion is by asking participants what they are feeling.

Lindstrom won’t be losing sleep over what market researchers think of his book anyway – he’s targeting the mass market. After all, he’s a self-proclaimed marketing expert, and this book is his product. But in trying to bolster his considerable wisdom and expertise with neuroscience, he risks doing both a disservice.

Fearing the mind
Ironically, the one thing his book proves for certain is that the science remains in its infancy. If this is, as Lindstrom believes, the result of fear, then surely the scariest thing is not the threat neuroscience poses to conventional methods, but the sheer cost and uncertainty of it – both of which Buyology is testament to.

Graham Page speaks highly of Lindstrom – who has worked with Millward Brown in the past – but wonders about Buyology’s contribution to the field. “I do think neuroscience has its applications but I worry that this doesn’t help progress things, because, although it’s based on solid stuff, the way he’s done it detracts from the value of the research,” says Page. “Only time will tell on that, but I’m worried about the risk.”