Branding Strategy Insider

Neuro-Marketing's Limits and Advertising Creativity

2009-12-18T00:10:00-05:00

As a cognitive anthropologist, who some 20 years ago traded backpack and quinine for Dramamine and a Hartmann three-suitor, I consult with marketers to assess the base beliefs and longings of various publics.

My method is to talk to people as people, not consumers. In that way, I learn about how they transform the world into their world. The twists of paradox, compartmentalization and irony are always exquisitely on display.

By-passing Langauage- Straight to the Brain

Recently, a client asked me to work with a company that is using brain wave activity, or measures of blood flow in the brain, to assess central nervous system response to certain advertisements and products. The idea being to bypass consumers' language and rational thought in the name of metrics, and its lookalike, objectivity.

What I discovered was that no matter how good the scientists were at designing stimuli and reading fMRI results, the very best they could do for our client was to warn them what to eliminate from their ads. The advice garnered from peering under the consumer's skull could only suggest what NOT to do. Unfortunately, the data from their procedure could not help us to determine what TO DO to enhance an advertisement's effectiveness.

Fear and Anxiety Measured

Fear and anxiety are what neuro-marketing technology is perfectly suited to measure, because it's hard-wired. For example, at the pre-conscious and non-linguistic level, the sight of a man sitting at a table in his garage working at a laptop evoked the same "negative" response from people of varied demographic categorization. Through various experimental manipulations of this image, it was discovered that "garage" had negative connotations, similar to that of a "basement" image - a place where dark things can happen. All such images were removed from subsequent public marketing pitches.

The most primal of emotional states is an individual's response to a perceived threat. Flight or fight. Instinct clicks in. Adrenaline flows, muscles tense, the heart beats faster. Blood pressure rises. No thought is required. The body does it all for you in the name of self-preservation.

Minimizing the Negative

Neuromarketing technology can help to minimize the negative. However, it cannot help to maximize the positive. That takes creativity and a holistic view of a person as a real human being.

A localized purchase-button deep inside the brain does not exist. The traverse from brain to behavior is a art-like process that blends data, emotion and belief that is then decantered into a person's personal brand of meaning.

Courtesy: Dr. Bob Deutsch, Brain-Sells

Sponsored By: The Brand Positioning Workshop

Fix the Product, Then the Perception

2009-12-17T00:10:00-05:00

Business is off 40%. You lost $9 million last year, compared with a $7 million profit the year before. Average age of your customers is up to 73, from 68 a decade ago.

It was definitely time for a makeover at Elderhostel Inc., the venerable travel and educational organization for older adults. Among its needs:

- Greater recognition from active baby boomers who are financially secure, have time on their hands and are curious about places they’ve never seen.

- No more minimum age restrictions.

- New programs and tours with wider appeal.

- And, oh yes, a new name.

Elderhostel got its start 30 years ago, offering adults 60 and older noncredit classes and inexpensive housing on college campuses. Its cofounder allegedly asked, “If there are youth hostels, then why aren’t there elder hostels?”

But soon thereafter, people started asking for better accommodations. No more sharing a bathroom down the hall. No more backpacks. Admits one executive, “The name wasn’t even descriptive back then.”

As their website acknowledges today, “There are millions for whom the name itself is a barrier they cannot get past – either because they don’t perceive themselves as elders or because the word hostel represents an inaccurate description of our accommodations.”

As a famous gambler would say, you gotta know when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’em. It’s high time to fold that old name.

Elderhostel’s new name: Exploritas, a word that fuses “explore” with “veritas” (Latin for truth).

Says their CEO: “We hope the new name will evoke the idea of exploring the world and your mind, and searching for truth.”

Sponsored By: The Brand Positioning Workshop

Forgiveness and the Tiger Woods Brand

2009-12-16T00:10:00-05:00

Tiger Woods as super-athlete cum Human Brand, resonates with values that sports fans and non-sports fans adore: skill, planning prowess, the ability to get of out of sand traps with a single stroke. PR traps, too. These values –beyond his ability to win and his status as the first billion-dollar athlete in the history of the world – create a loyalty bond that’s second to none. And when you engender loyalty like that, people are six times more likely to give the brand (in this case The Human Brand, Woods) the benefit of the doubt.

Yesterday, Nike, Woods’ largest sponsor announced that its advertising plans involving him would not be altered by Mr. Woods’ “transgressions.” In a statement, Nike said, “ Tiger and his family have Nike’s full support. We respect Tiger’s request for privacy and our thoughts are with Tiger and his family at this time.”

“Sponsor expedience,” you say? That’s as well may be. But had the company an iota of evidence that the “transgression” was appreciably affecting company image and sales, they’d dump him as fast as a golfer scraps a driver with a cracked shaft!

Loyalty isn’t capricious. It’s palpable, especially as it regards sales and situations where the brand requires the benefit of the doubt. It’s far more emotional than rational, which is why virtually 100% of people asked if Tiger’s behavior was acceptable, would tell you “no,” and why that same 100% are willing to forgive his indiscretions. Which is why his biggest sponsors – along with his fans – have reaffirmed their support for him.

Here’s a marketing truth: Loyalty is always accompanied by positive consumer behavior and sales, and consumers willing to buy more, recommend more, rebuff competitive offers, and even invest in publicly traded companies. And sometimes it comes with a metaphorical ‘Get Out of Jail Card.”

But here’s another marketing truth: engendering that level of loyalty doesn’t happen by chance.

Courtesy: Robert Passikoff, Brand Keys

Sponsored By: The Brand Positioning Workshop

Brand Naming: Get it Right or Get Forgotten

2009-12-14T00:09:28-05:00

On my first real job (at General Electric in Schenectady, N.Y.) I noticed a consistent advertiser in the electrical publications with an unusual name.

A company selling wire and cable was called "Crapo." Presumably pronounced Cray-po and not Crap-o.

That's terrible, I thought. Oh no, my more experienced colleagues said, one of the first things you need to learn in this business is that names don't matter. What matters is the quality of the product.

That's been a common refrain in my years of marketing work. Whenever I objected to a brand name, I would hear the same thing: Names don't matter.

For example, a recent column about DDB's new Budweiser campaign on AdAge.com drew 26 comments. Mostly negative. Commentators were critical of the music, the superficiality of the idea, the absence of storytelling and the lack of authenticity, among other things.

Nobody bothered to mention the one thing that seems to be driving Budweiser into the ground.

Bud Light.

How can anyone position a brand called "Budweiser" when the entire industry is moving to light beer? Especially when the brand itself has validated the concept by introducing a light version of its regular beer.

Then there's the fact that the Budweiser regular brand has lost volume every year in a row for the last 20 years.

If you're going to re-position the Budweiser brand, you're going to have to figure out how to get Joe Six-Pack to drink regular beer instead of light beer.

But then, names don't matter to most marketing people. What matters to most marketing people is the casting, the story line, the emotional involvement, the big idea.

Names are important. Too many marketing campaigns start off with high hopes and an impossible name. That's like drawing to an inside straight.

Almost every day, a large company jumps into the market with a major product launch and an impossible name. Take Dell's recent announcement that it is developing smartphone products for sale in China and Brazil.

No mention of a new name, of course, and why should anyone expect a new name for the company's smartphone line? Dell didn't use a new name for its television sets, its MP3 players and its online music-downloading store, products and services it apparently no longer sells.

Names don't matter, of course. What matters is how the new product stacks up against competitive products. That's the conventional wisdom.

A number of years ago, I was working on advertising for Babcock & Wilcox, a company that received the first license from the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission for a nuclear power plant.

That should have been a sure thing, but the company never built a single nuclear power plant. One problem was the name. While General Electric was promoting its Boiling Water Reactor and Westinghouse was promoting its Pressurized Water Reactor, Babcock & Wilcox was promoting its Spectral Shift Control Reactor.

Spectral Shift Control Reactor? I spent the better part of a day arguing about the name with the engineers involved in the project. "Spectral Shift Control Reactor" is going to frighten electric-utility executives who were already concerned about the dangers of nuclear power. Why can't we give the Babcock & Wilcox design a different name? Nobody wants his spectrals shifted.

It was a lost cause. Once a name gets circulated in internal memos for a couple of months, the name gets set in concrete and is almost impossible to change.

Category names like "spectral shift control reactor" are a particular problem when dealing with people who consider themselves "inventors." Quite often, an inventor wants a complicated category name to demonstrate how important his or her invention is.

The first match was called a "sulphuretted peroxide strikable."

The first lie detector was called a "cardio-pneumo psychograph."

The first computer was called an "electronic numerical integrator and computer."

Have you ever heard of the "Il Giornale" brand? That was a chain of coffee shops started by entrepreneur Howard Schultz in 1985. Two years later, he bought the Starbucks chain from Peet's Coffee & Tea.

Starbucks or Il Giornale? Names don't matter; it's the quality of the coffee, of course.

Fortunately, names did matter to Howard Schultz, who had the good sense to rebrand his Il Giornale outlets as Starbucks, and the rest is history.

Have you heard of the "College of New Jersey?" Probably not, since 113 years ago it changed its name to Princeton University.

College of New Jersey or Princeton University? Names don't matter, of course; it's the quality of the faculty and the students.

For some reason, many educational institutions are locked into the idea that their names have to indicate their geographical locations. (It was a lucky break the College of New Jersey was located in the town of Princeton. It could have been located in Hoboken.)

Thirteen years ago, Trenton State College became the College of New Jersey, a second reincarnation of the name. After spending the money for a name change, you might have thought that Trenton State would have picked a more euphonious name.

Then there's SUNY, the State University of New York, with 64 campuses and more than 400,000 students. The largest university in the SUNY system is the State University of New York at Buffalo. As The New York Times reported, "even its national reputation, buzz and research dollars put it nowhere near the ranks of the University of California, Berkeley."

Buffalo or Berkeley? Names don't matter of course; it's the quality of the faculty and the students.

To have any power at all, a name must be linked to a positive idea in the prospect's mind. Just because a name is well known doesn't mean that it has any marketing value.

One place where names really matter is Hollywood. Many movie stars have replaced their birth names with more euphonious names. Alphonso D'Abruzzo became Alan Alda. Tomas Mapother IV became Tom Cruise. Bernard Schwartz became Tony Curtis. Doris von Kappelhoff became Doris Day. Issur Danielovitch became Kirk Douglas. And the list goes on.

Over the past few decades, there has been a strong trend from analog to digital. This is the trend that has created a number of incredibly successful high-tech brands: Microsoft, Nokia, Google, Intel, Hewlett-Packard, Cisco, Apple, Oracle, SAP, Dell, Nintendo, Amazon, eBay, BlackBerry and Adobe.

Together these 15 brands are worth, according to Interbrand, $284.5 billion.

But missing from Interbrand's list of the "100 best global brands" is Kodak, the inventor of the digital camera.

It was 23 years ago that Kodak introduced the DC4800, the world's first digital camera. Now do you suppose that anyone at Kodak bothered to ask, "Why are we using a film-photography name on a digital-photography camera?"

Probably not. Logical left-brain thinkers might assume that the move into the digital world would have enhanced the value of the Kodak brand. That's usually the excuse for hanging onto an obsolete name.

As one Kodak executive said recently, "It's probably one of the most iconic companies in the world ... to be able to work with a brand name like Kodak is a dream come true."

The numbers tell a different story. In the eight years before the turn of the millennium, Kodak had sales of $119.7 billion, net profits of $7.9 billion and a net profit margin of 6.6%.

But in the eight years since the turn of the millennium, Kodak had sales of $100.2 billion and net profits ... well, they didn't make any money. They actually lost $5 million.

I've been on the losing side of "name" arguments with companies such as IBM, Xerox, Western Union, Eastern Airlines, Miller Brewing, Coors, General Electric, Tambrands, Continental Airlines, Scott Kay, Motorola and others.

But, of course, names don't matter. It's the quality of the product that counts.

Sponsored By: The Brand Positioning Workshop