Logos and Brand Identity

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I don’t love it, but I think it will grow on me

nike-swoosh-6This was the comment Philip Knight, the founder of Nike made when he first saw the design for the iconic swoosh logo. The year was 1971. He had commissioned Carolyn Davidson, a graphic design student at Portland State University to design the logo for a fee of $35.

I love this story for two reasons. First of all it is a true success story, especially considering how long Nike has come since then as a brand. Second, I think there is a lesson to be learned about designing a brand identity here. Nowadays companies pay thousands of dollars to agencies for design and branding services. But sometimes a $35 logo is all you need to start…

Great marketers don’t make stuff. They make meaning.

People often use the words ‘brand’ and ‘logo’ interchangeably. A logo is simply the visual representation of a business. It is the central element that helps consumers to visually (or sometimes auditorily – think McDonald’s audio logo) identify a brand. A brand, on the other hand, is so much more than a logo. It is a collection of perceptions, associations and memories that are created over time as the consumers interact with a product. One of the greatest definitions of a brand is one that Seth Godin gave: A brand is the set of expectations, memories, stories and relationships that, taken together, account for a consumer’s decision to choose one product or service over another. This is such an accurate description, as it encompasses the entire brand experience.

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When you close your eyes and think about Nike, it is not just the swoosh that you are envisioning. It is the feeling you had when you bought your first ever pair of Nike shoes; Your favourite athlete that you pretended to be when you were playing soccer as a kid; Michael Jordan’s signature fadeaway jumper moves and so many more interactions and memories that you developed over the years. Now you may not be a Nike fan but you can try this exercise with any brand that you truly like and you will realize how the meaning of that brand to you is influenced by several external factors.

What this means is that you don’t always have full control over the development of your brand. When people start using your products and experiencing them in millions of different ways, your brand starts evolving through these interactions and develops its own personality. And sometimes, no matter how great a job a business is doing, some people will develop negative associations and memories. You can do everything right with your branding efforts but if a consumer buys a brand new pair of your expensive shoes on the same day as a bad life event, he/she will have a negative association to your brand that is completely unrelated to your product. This is why branding is an ongoing effort and not a one-time achievement. A business has to be constantly working on forging positive associations to its brand to overcome these unfortunate experiences.

Back to the swoosh
It took Nike $35 and decades of persistence to bring its brand to where it is right now. While there are many great lessons to be learned from this example, the biggest takeaway for me is that you can’t simply buy a brand. Nike spent $35 on its iconic logo that became so much more than a logo. Over the years it became so recognizable that they don’t even need to use the business name with it anymore. So it doesn’t matter whether you spend $35 or $35,000 on a logo design, it will still take years of hard work and consistent marketing communication efforts to develop a truly memorable and strong brand.

The Decoy Effect

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Marketers will try anything to get customers to buy the product/service that they are selling. In a fiercely competitive environment, one has to come up with smart marketing ideas and get creative. One such technique is the decoy effect that we all encounter on a daily basis but probably do not pay too much attention.

Here’s the idea in a nutshell: If you want to sell more of a product, offer your customers a similar but slightly more inferior product in the same price range. Sounds pretty counterintuitive, even borderline stupid right?

Turns out this tactic actually works like a charm! Dan Ariely, who conducts extensive research in behavioural economics, ran a little experiment to see how it actually plays out. When he came upon a banner on the Economist magazine’s website, advertising their subscription plans, Ariely could not make sense out of the two plans that were priced exactly the same but one of them was clearly a much better alternative.

economist

Puzzled by this, he created two versions of this ad, one that included ‘print subscription’ and one that did not.

versions

One group was shown version 1 and the other group was given version 2 to decide which subscription model they prefer. The results are quite interesting.

When people were asked to choose from all three options, 84% of them said they wanted the print & web subscription, 16% went for the online-only plan, while not a single participant signed up for the print subscription, which clearly provided no value. It all makes sense so far. Here’s where it gets interesting: When the subjects were given only two of these options (online subscription or print & web subscription), 68% of the respondents chose the online option while only 32% said they would go with the print & web alternative.

Let’s put this into perspective. If we calculate the company’s sales from each scenario based on 100 participants, here are the results:

Price Scenario 1 Scenario 2 Profit 1 Profit 2
Online $59 16 68 $944 $4,012
Print $125 0 N/A 0 0
Print & Web $125 84 32 $10,500 $4,000
$11,444 $8,012

 

By simply adding a third price plan (decoy), the company has increased its sales significantly in the first scenario, even though the decoy plan had no subscriptions.

The decoy effect works for a very simple reason: relativity. Human brain is designed to think in relative terms. We as a species have an extremely hard time processing information in absolute terms. In this case, introducing a less attractive version of the product that you actually want to sell makes the superior version of that product look even more attractive. Not just relative to its inferior, but also to other products.

Imagine a new product being launched. It is a brand new technology and nothing like this has ever been done before. It is so unique that it doesn’t even belong to any product category that we know. As a consumer, how do you decide what a fair price for this product would be? You have no anchor point, no benchmark, no reference. This is exactly how the decoy effect works by creating an anchor (the inferior product) so that the consumer can value the other options relative to that. Its simplicity is why it is brilliant.

Decisions, Decisions…

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About two months ago I wanted to buy a beard trimmer. It is a very simple and straightforward device that can be found in pretty much any electronics store, drug store or supermarket. It has been two months and I still don’t have one. Not because of scarcity or the price range of the product. It is simply because of the number of choices that were available to me in the store. I got overwhelmed by the variety of different devices that were hardly differentiated from one another and finally gave up.

trimmer

Following this unsuccessful mission, I started thinking about the amplitude of choices we have for many other product categories. Every time we go shopping for virtually any product, there is an abundance of product assortments that we have to filter through. This whole experience coincided with a book that I was reading at the time called ‘The Art of Choosing’ by Sheena Iyengar. Professor Iyengar talks about this exact phenomenon in her book; how the number of choices we have actually makes it difficult for us to make a decision.

To explore this seemingly counterintuitive concept a little further, she ran an experiment in a high-end grocery store. The premise was simple: set up two different in-store tasting stations in alternating days; one offering 6 different flavours of jam and another one with 24 different options. The hypothesis was that the higher the number of choices, the higher the sales should be. After all, if you have more variety in your product line, you can appeal to more different tastes. However, the results told a completely different story.

24 Jams 6 Jams
# of customers passing by 242 260
# of customers stopped by 145 104
# of customers who purchased 4 31
% customers stopped by 60% 40%
% customers purchased 3% 30%

Two important takeaways came out of this study. The first one being that providing more options is in fact more powerful in attracting customers. The stand with 24 jams made 60% of the passers-by stop and take a look at it as opposed to 40% with the stand that offered only 6 jams. This part was completely in line with the initial assumption. While it is important to grab attention and stand out of the crowd in a competitive market, the ultimate goal is to make sales. After all, why would anyone be in business if they are not selling? And this is where the study took a completely different turn because only 3% of the customers who stopped by the stand with 24 jams made a purchase whereas the same ratio for the other stand was 30%.

It can be argued that this is just one isolated study about a very specific product, conducted with a very small sample population. It is true that there are numerous other variables in decision-making. Factors such as our environment, the price range of the product, and even the mood that we are in on that particular day are all elements that contribute to our decision-making. We live in an unpredictable world and anything that involves human beings brings with it lots of uncertainty and variability. This does not mean that the other end of the spectrum, having only one or two products per line, is the right solution. The objective is to find the optimal number of products that will work for the category in question. Unfortunately, like with most other topics in marketing, there is not a one-size-fits-all solution for this and the length of an ideal product line varies from one industry to another. Michaela Draganska, a professor of marketing who spent a lot of time researching product line management, conducted an in-depth study with yogurt brands. As anyone who has ever gone grocery shopping would agree, yogurt aisles in every supermarket are arguably the most overwhelming areas in terms of alternatives.

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Draganska sifted through years of data to build a mathematical model that establishes a connection between the length of a product line and consumer choices. As a result of her research, she found that only 3 out of the 13 yogurt brands that she analyzed would actually benefit from a line extension. In other words, 77% of the researched brands were better off keeping a lean product line with limited offerings. Interestingly enough, the three brands that were recommended to have longer product lines were all local, no-frills products, which, according to Draganska, is because a longer product line might be a signal of higher quality and boost their image on the market.

Another study conducted by Joseph Goodman and Selin Malkoc, professors at Washington University in St. Louis, revealed that consumer preference for a larger product assortment decreases as the psychological distance increases. In other words, shoppers prefer to have less number of choices if they are making a buying decision for the future. The researchers concluded that “the lure of assortment may not be as universal as previously thought.”

The Needs of the Many Outweigh the Needs of the Few

When it comes to consumer decision-making, nothing is black and white. Making choices is a complex mental process that involves multiple inputs and that can only have one output. This is why it is important to make the distinction between choice overload and information overload. The yogurt case is a typical example of choice overload where the shopper gets confused simply by looking at the multitude of options available. The beard trimmer case is a good instance of poor information, as well as choice profusion. From a business standpoint, it is critical that companies understand how their customers are shopping for that particular product, the thought process and the customer purchase journey in order to design a product line that is not stretched too far but one that offers enough variety to keep most consumers happy. It is not impossible to design a separate product for everyone’s taste, nor is it financially feasible for any company in the world. The objective is to come up with the optimal number that will satisfy the majority of the target audience.

Sex in Advertising

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34. That’s the number of times a man thinks about sex on average per day. The same number for a woman is 19.*

This shouldn’t come as a surprise, given that we are creatures driven by primal urges including survival and procreation. And businesses that want to sell us their products know this very well. In fact, they have been using our urges against us to sell for almost a century! Just take a look at the ad below from the 1920s.

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Sex in advertising has always been a controversial topic, sparking a wide range of reactions from public outrage to curious attraction. We all heard about the infamous phrase “sex sells” and we are bombarded by advertisements with sexual content these days. While it’s true that including sexual elements in advertising drastically increases the chances of attention grabbing, there are numerous studies to refute the hypothesis that it actually increases sales.

Let’s start with a few examples to see how different companies use sexually suggestive ads to sell their products. When it comes to sex in advertising, the first brand that comes to mind in North America is Calvin Klein. Those who are old enough to remember the commercials featuring Brooke Shields know what I mean. If you don’t, just take a look at the video below:

Keep in mind that this was the early 1980s when sexually suggestive commercials were not as common as it is today. In fact, it wouldn’t be incorrect to say that this is the ad that started the trend to use sex to sell a product in the modern era. The ad was controversial to say the least, as it was successful. Calvin Klein jeans shot up to two million pairs a month in sales and the company, seeing the potential of this new advertising strategy, took it up a few more notches over the next couple of years by rolling out more controversial campaigns with Mark Wahlberg (then known as the rapper Marky Mark), Christy Turlington and Kate Moss. Despite the public outrage, protests by anti-pornography groups and even cancellation of certain campaigns, the company enjoyed increasing sales over the course of next two decades. In the 2000s, Calvin Klein started facing heavy competition from new players with the likes of Abercrombie & Fitch and American Apparel. It was almost as though the company’s code for growth was cracked when other firms started using the power of sex and controversy in their advertising. It became almost standard issue for clothing brands to create racy, sexual and sometimes soft-pornographic advertisements to spark public fury and capitalize on the free publicity that it creates. Just a quick look at the assortment of advertisements below will give you a better visual idea of what I mean:

AF
Dolce Gabbana
x6028As these cases indicate, sex in advertising works when it comes to creating awareness and buzz for your brand. The question is whether it’s the sex that sells or the controversy it creates. To answer this, let’s take a look at a study conducted in 2007 at the University College London. This research looked at the recall of sexual and non-sexual television commercials embedded within programmes, with or without, sexual content. To do this, the researchers divided 60 adults into four groups, two of them watching a sexual program (Sex and the City) and two of them watching a non-sexual TV show (Malcolm in the Middle). Each TV episode was embedded with either sexual or non-sexual commercials to measure brand recall. After the experiment, the participants were asked to remember the names of the brands they had seen during the commercials. The results, as you can see below, are quite fascinating in that the group that watched Sex and the City had a much lower recall rate than the other group, regardless of the content of the commercials. The researches concluded that the existence of sexual content in a program impairs the ability of the brain to focus on other content.

Sex and the City
Sexual Ad Non-Sexual Ad
Mean Standard Deviation Mean Standard Deviation
Free Recall 3.87 2.13 5.67 1.95
Cued Recall 5.53 2.64 6.87 2.67
Malcolm in the Middle
Sexual Ad Non-Sexual Ad
Mean Standard Deviation Mean Standard Deviation
Free Recall 7.2 3.1 6.53 2.23
Cued Recall 9.73 2.37 9.6 1.96

Putting this academic research into a business context, it could be quite possible that over the top sexual content in advertising may actually be working against a brand. Sexy models and/or nudity might attract initial attention from the viewers, however the actual brand message is often eclipsed by the sexual content of the advertisement. This is further supported by another study** conducted by MediaAnalyzer Software & Research, where 200 subjects were shown ads ranging from suggestive cigarette ads to very unsexy credit card promotions. The results showed that especially men had a much lower brand recall than women when it comes to commercials that include sexual content, as they spend too much time looking at the suggestive content, rather than the brand message itself.

Untitled

MediaAnalyzer used the above image to sum up its findings from the research. This picture perfectly explains the difference between the way a man and a woman looks at an advertisement and why brand recall is much lower within the male population.

Another explanation is about the product itself. According to Jeffrey Richards, an advertising professor at the University of Texas, sex only sells if the product you are selling is related to sex. So if you were selling, say, condoms, then it would make perfect sense for your brand to create an advertising campaign around that. But Richards says that when companies use sex to sell very unsexy products (such as the drain cleaner below), consumers might be intrigued but they are not going to remember your company name, or the product you are selling.

To recapitulate some of the arguments about sex in advertising:

 

  • Brand recall: Sex in advertising creates an obstacle for the viewer to focus on the actual content of the ad, in most cases overshadowing the brand name and reducing brand recall.
  • Relevance: Sex sells if the product you are selling is related to sex.
  • Gender: When sex does sell, it usually sells to men

 

Sex in advertising remains to be a very debatable concept and what is memorable and acceptable to one person might not be for another. Having said that, the data suggests that there is a correlation between sexual content and brand recall, which is why companies should be careful when designing a risqué ad campaign. Going back to the Calvin Klein example one more time, it is undeniable that the controversy that sex triggers has a multi-prong effect that not only intrigues people about the brand and the product, but also creates an attraction towards the condemned. Just like a movie or a book becoming popular after being banned, the same principle applies to the ad campaigns that are publicly denounced, creating buzz and curiosity around them. Calvin Klein took advantage of the free publicity and the controversy it created through its racy ads for years and it has proven to be quite powerful. To me the question still remains: is it sex that sells, or the controversy?

* The numbers are derived from the study conducted by Dr. Terri D. Fisher, Professor of Psychology at The Ohio State University at Mansfield. (https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-sexual-continuum/201112/how-often-do-men-and-women-think-about-sex)

** http://www.adweek.com/news/advertising/does-sex-really-sell-82104

Mobile Search is Only the Beginning

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Earlier this year, Google announced that it optimized its algorithm to promote mobile-friendly websites in its organic search results, and for good reason. According to an article published by the company in May, “more Google searches take place on mobile devices than on computers in 10 countries including the US and Japan”. Another recent report by Google also stated that nearly half of all mobile phone users start their research for buying a new product on a mobile search engine. We all knew that this day was coming but maybe some of us did not anticipate how quickly it was going to happen.

After Google revealed the algorithm change that will give mobile-friendly sites priority in search results, a lot of companies (particularly the ones that did not have a mobile version of their websites) dropped everything and started working on a new website design that is optimized for mobile devices. Of course, this is the wise thing to do in today’s digital-focused marketing landscape. However, focusing their efforts in optimizing the search aspect of mobile experience, companies have been neglecting the end of the journey, the transaction stage, where businesses actually convert the leads into paying customers. It seems like companies are putting a lot of effort into optimizing their sites so that they can be indexed and browsed a lot easier on mobile devices but not enough focus on closing sales on these same devices. As a result, mobile add-to-cart and transaction rates are currently much lower than those of desktop computers. This is supported by data from Monetate which suggests that merchants are experiencing a high rate of checkout drop-off and cart abandonment. What this means is users are starting their search online, browsing products and even adding products in their shopping cart. But when it comes to completing the transaction, they prefer to do that when they get to their desktop computers at home, which suggests that the usability of the mobile check-out systems are still not optimal for a start-to-finish purchasing experience. The concern here is the disconnect that results from the time spent between the mobile search and the desktop purchase. Once the users switch to their desktop computers, who knows if they will start their research all over again and perhaps end up on a competitor’s website for the checkout.

As mentioned above, there seems to be a missed opportunity here for businesses to fill in this gap by providing an all-encompassing buying experience on mobile platforms. From a user experience perspective, there are a few issues that need to be addressed when designing a mobile purchasing system. First and foremost, these transactions are likely going to take place in public areas such as busses, restaurants or bars. Places that people may not feel 100% comfortable taking their credit cards out of their pockets and openly start typing the number on their smartphones. Apple mitigates this issues with iCloud Keychain system where your credit card information is stored within your Apple ID and thus you don’t have to type it every single time you make a purchase. Another way to overcome this obstacle might be a system such as “Charge to Mobile” in the UK, wherein the phone operator directly bills the user for the purchase he/she makes without the use of a credit card. In addition to the privacy/safety concerns, an optimized e-commerce experience for mobile devices is critical for success. Especially when there is money exchange involved in the process, users tend to be a lot more cautious in their interactions with websites. It is important to provide a mobile specific shopping experience that is designed or optimized for the device that the customer is using. An optimized design, combined with a safe checkout system will encourage more customers to finish the transaction process they started on mobile devices.

In short, mobile search optimization, mobile e-commerce experience and a publicly safe checkout system should be seen as interconnected pieces of this puzzle rather than independent items. Bringing the customers to your mobile website should only be seen as the beginning of the journey. Half the battle is still providing a holistic experience that will streamline the process and make sure that they complete the journey without any problems.

 

The Difference Between Social Media and Content Marketing

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“Your customers don’t care about you, your products, or your services. They care about themselves”.

This is how Joe Pulizzi makes the introduction to his book “Epic Content Marketing”. As counterintuitive as it may seem to start a business book this way, pretty quickly you understand the point he is trying to make as he gets into more detail about content marketing and its role within the customer purchase journey.

Before we actually get into the main subject of this post, the difference between content marketing and social media, what exactly is this trendy concept that we keep calling ‘content marketing’? It seems to me that it has become a buzzword in the business world where executives keep giving directions to their subordinates to take advantage of content marketing in order to increase leads. But what exactly is it? In a nutshell, I believe that it would be an accurate description to say that it is the type of marketing that focuses on the customer rather than the product/service you are trying to sell. It is about satisfying the informational needs of your target customers or prospects. And let’s make one thing clear; although content marketing may seem like a new idea, it has existed since the beginning of time. It is about conveying important information to one another in a compelling and interesting way. Taken out of a business context, this is how we human beings interact with each other on a daily basis. We seek information, we look for solutions to our ongoing challenges and we want a reliable source that will provide us with the answers.

PNR-content-marketing-John-DeereYou may have noticed that so far I haven’t mentioned anything about hard sells or call to actions and it is not because I forgot about them. Content marketing is not about pitching your products; it is about creating and nurturing a relationship with your target market through sharing relevant information that they are seeking out there in the cyber space (or whatever other medium you are using). How does that help you improve your business or increase your leads? Let me answer that with a well-known example. Most of us have heard of the agricultural giant John Deere & Company. The firm has been manufacturing agricultural equipment since the 1800s and has a very strong and loyal customer base around the world. What you may not be aware of is that they have been using content marketing techniques since 1895, the year they launched The Furrow magazine. This publication was solely about providing information to farmers about how they can improve their businesses, maximize their profits and overcome the challenges they face. This way, John Deere started connecting with all these prospective customers in a well-defined segment, forging the association as the company that genuinely cares about the needs and success of the farmers. The magazine was only about sharing knowledge, without a single piece of promotional item in it. So when the time came for the farmers to buy new agricultural equipment, what was the company that they first thought of? John Deere. So as you can see, content marketing is not a quick-fix solution, but rather a long-term commitment for long lasting results.

Now that we defined what content marketing is with a real-life example, let’s talk about how it differentiates from social media. At first sight, they may seem almost identical and there is definitely a lot of overlap between the two. Having said that, they are not interchangeable, but rather complimentary.

“The difference between content marketing and social media is huge. Social media is a new channel. And it competes with other media channels like TV, radio, print and all the digital channels available to us. Content marketing and storytelling are as old as human beings. We have always needed to find ways to convey important information in useful and entertaining ways.” – Michael Brenner (VP of Marketing and Content Strategy, SAP)

Elaborating on Michael Brenner’s statement above, one of the main differentiators between social media and content marketing is the focus of the marketing activity. When you are working with a social media channel, your marketing activity is focused (and limited) to that particular channel. Say, if you are running a Twitter campaign, you are essentially operating within the confines of the Twitter ecosystem. Not to mention the chosen social platform’s own restrictions such as the character limit on Twitter. In content marketing, on the other hand, your operating platform can be whatever you want it to be; a website, a microsite, a landing page or even print media. In other words, you have more freedom and control over the distribution of your content.

In my opinion, the main difference that sets social media and content marketing apart is the steps they focus on in the customer purchase journey* (or customer purchase funnel as some call it). Although you can design your content to serve various purposes, social media mainly revolves around creating awareness and customer retention. (Steps 1 and 5).

* Customer Purchase Journey
customer-purchase-journey

The objective of content marketing is to help and guide the prospects through every step of this journey providing the relevant information that they look for in each stage. The focus is then to identify and understand the specific interests and expectations of a particular segment in a given step of their journey with your brand. Consumers in the awareness stage will likely be looking for very different information than those in the preference or purchase stage. What is crucial is to provide the right information to the right prospects, in the right place and in the right time. Of course, this is easier said than done. This is why we are witnessing the rise of marketing automation, a series of technologies that are designed to help marketers more effectively target consumers with relevant communications in each step of the purchase journey.

In achieving the objectives of content marketing, the quality of the content you are publishing becomes critical. While there are opposing views on it, social media channels tend to be more about frequent and easily digestible quick updates as opposed to elaborate content. This contributes to a company’s online presence from a ‘search engine optimized content’ perspective. However, what’s more important is to understand the customer journey, identify the needs at each step and then provide keyword optimized, SEO friendly content that will not only boost your rankings, but will also deliver your prospects the exact information they are looking for.

Although they have their differences, social media and content marketing are meant to work together as interconnected parts of your marketing system. They compliment each other rather than work in different directions. What is important is to understand each channel’s purpose, identify your customer journey process and take advantage of these resources to meet the consumers in the right place with the right information. It is going to be very exciting to see this all working together with marketing automation systems so synchronized that the information that your customers want will be there waiting for them before they even get to that step.

Neuromarketing

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As marketers, we are all driven by one simple goal: how do we convince our potential customers to buy our products/services and eventually turn them into loyal users of our brand? In doing this, we try different channels, different techniques and strategies to see what works the best. Companies have been spending tons of money in buying advertising space, trying to create awareness of their brands and conducting market research in hopes to get a better understanding of the purchasing behaviour. As a marketer I have always been fascinated with the latter. I always felt that understanding what drives the customers’ buying habits would be the key to launching a successful marketing campaign. It is the key to spending our marketing dollars on the right areas where we are confident that we will get a return. To explore this interest further, I took all the market research courses I possibly could during my MBA and I got involved in actual real-life market research projects for local firms to get a better understanding of how it’s done. As valuable as I think this experience was, I have always felt that something was missing. We were crafting surveys, conducting in-depth interviews to really understand what makes the customers tick. But I was never sure whether we were getting the right answers. And this was not because I thought people were lying to us or deliberately holding back crucial information that would help us. I simply thought that often times people did not actually know the real answers to our questions. They didn’t know what they wanted or even if they did it was not easy to articulate it in words. More importantly, I thought that a lot of the real answer were in fact hiding beneath the conscious mind so even if the interviewees wanted to give us honest answers, they just weren’t aware of them on a conscious level. Then I stumbled upon the concept of neuromarketing. Frankly, it sounded like something out of a sci-fi movie where people used mind control devices to manipulate others, which I guess it could be used in such a way if that was the intention. But what intrigued me was the potential of this fairly new field as it pertains to market research. Our customers may not be able to articulate their true feelings and opinions about a brand in words. But if we could somehow retrieve this information from its source –the brain- then they wouldn’t have to! This entire premise is of course limited to our current and incomplete understanding of the human brain. But with the recent developments in neuroscience, we are now able to generate neurological maps that can pinpoint the specific areas of the brain where neural activity is present. Although this technology is primarily used to enhance our understanding of mental illnesses and unlock the mysteries of human brain, its extensions into business management are starting to make a significant impact in market research.

fmri1

This amazing partnership between neuroscience and marketing is executed through the use fMRI (Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) procedure where the brain activity is measured through the detection of associated changes in blood flow. This information is then processed and mapped out on a computer screen that allows us to see the brain areas that register activity during specific actions. This way, researchers can identify what areas of the brain are activated when a subject is watching a new commercial, the pilot of a new TV show, or even when different sensory impulses are activated. And thanks to our current understanding of the human brain, we can tell what emotions are associated with the activated brain area. Whether it is a pleasant experience that will result in a marketing success or just a horrible scheme that is doomed to fail.

 

Since it is still an evolving field, it is not very easy to find countless resources on the subject. However, If you are interested in finding out more about the potential in neuromarketing, I would highly recommend checking out ‘Buyology’ and ‘Brandwashed’ by Martin Lindstrom, ‘Brainfluence’ by Roger Dooley, ‘Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion’ by Robert Cialdini and ‘Predictably Irrational’ by Dan Ariely. I am looking forward to seeing the evolution of this field and how it is going to change the face of market research.

Sensory Marketing and the Future of Branding

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Has it ever happened to you that you were walking down the street and you were stopped in your tracks because the person who walked right past you was wearing a fragrance that took you back to your high school years? If you are anything like me, then the answer is most likely ‘yes’.

The power of sensory impulses is not news for anyone. We are emotional creatures and we create strong associations using our senses: A song that reminds you of your first girlfriend, a smell that takes you back 10 years through time, or a photograph that brings back memories of that incredible trip you went on with your friends. What is new, however, and becoming more and more popular is the way companies use the power of sensory impulses to advertise their products and services. Let’s face it; we are bombarded with visual images, logos, bus ads and banners all day long, every day. And for all male readers, even when you are at the urinal in a restaurant or a pub, you are forced to look at ads on the wall. In this state of visual assault and overstimulation of our visual senses, it is becoming impossible for our brains to focus on any one of these ads and we are blocking out the majority of what we see. According to a recent study, the companies now have less than two seconds to grab our attention.

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In this visual chaos (just take a look at the photos of Times Square in New York and her little sister Dundas Square in Toronto), the power of sensory associations is becoming more and more crucial for companies. So much so that numerous restaurant chains are adding artificial food scents to their ventilation systems to appeal to our senses and to forge the brand-smell association in our brains. Or how a campaign by Dunkin’ Donuts in South Korea municipal buses increased nearby store visits by 16% and sales at the same stores by 29% simply by releasing a coffee aroma into the bus whenever the company jingle played. In his book ‘buy-ology’, Martin Lindstrom became the reason for one of the biggest disappointments in my life when he said that the new car smell that we all so passionately love actually comes from an aerosol can. The examples can go on and on but the bottom line is that the more senses are stimulated, the more enhanced our experiences are. And these influences are very subtle, which makes them even more powerful because we don’t perceive them as marketing messages and therefore we don’t react with the usual resistance to traditional ads and other hard-sell techniques.

The best way to summarize the increasing importance of sense-based marketing would be to quote Aradhna Krishna, the author of Customer Sense: How the 5 Senses Influence Buying Behavior: “In the past, communications with customers were essentially monologues—companies just talked at consumers. Then they evolved into dialogues, with customers providing feedback. Now they’re becoming multidimensional conversations, with products finding their own voices and consumers responding viscerally and subconsciously to them.”

So far I tried to convince you of the great impact of sensory marketing and I hope that I was able to make a good enough case. So what is going to happen in the future? There is no doubt in my head that sense-based marketing will become bigger and bigger. There are already firms out there focusing solely on creating sensory brand experiences and I think that we are going to see more of these companies in the near future. In a competitive landscape where it is becoming virtually impossible to differentiate your product purely based on visual appearances, there is no question that companies will resort to newer methods to try and break through the clutter. My question then is not whether or not sensory marketing will get bigger, because I believe that it will. To me it is rather a question of whether or not we will reach a point of saturation as we have with visual marketing. I am curious to see if there will come a day that we are so stimulated on multiple senses by product advertisements that we will reach a state in which our brains are going to filter out most of it like they do today. We will see…

Emotional Design and User Experience

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Anybody who works in a creative field has encountered the challenge of having a healthy balance between a visually appealing product that is perfectly functional at the same time at least once in their career. The product we are talking about can be anything from a website to a physical product or even writing copy for a marketing campaign. In my experience, the product was always a website. I don’t even remember the number of meetings I had with my marketing managers, discussing the visual design of a website we were working on. The discussion was always the same: How much text is too much? Should we have all these functionalities on the website?

I don’t intend to give a one-size-fits-all type answer to this question, nor do I think there is such a solution. Needless to say that the decision has many parameters such as who your target audience is, what kind of image you are trying to project and what type of brand identity you are trying to build. These high-level decisions will certainly affect the way you approach a design project. But generally speaking, I believe that there are certain facts based on how the human brain works, that gives us clues to how we can optimize the visual design of a product. The human prefrontal cortex is in charge of cognitive and executive functions such as attention and short-term memory. It helps us execute day-to-day tasks and make decisions. When we are presented with an emotional stimulus, the amygdala, the part of the limbic system that is in charge of emotional response, kicks in and releases dopamine into the system, which helps us register these events in our long-term memory. This is why people have been talking about Budweiser’s ‘Lost Dog’ Super Bowl ad even weeks after the game. The emotional connection it created with the audience was so intense that people haven’t forgotten about it. Aside from seeking emotional connection, our brains are also very hard working information processors. In his book “Designing for Emotion”, Aarron Walter talks about this phenomenon: “Beyond our ability to express emotion, we also share the instinct to search for patterns.” Our brain’s ability to search and identify patterns is a crucial tool for us to survive, as a break in the pattern alerts us to the existence of something unusual. This contrast identification is what helps designers catch the user’s attention in a given situation. However, as fascinating as our brains are, they are only capable of processing so much information in a given time, meaning that the more contrast there is, the harder it becomes for us to choose which one to focus on. As the American psychologists William Edmund Hick and Ray Hyman describe, increasing the number of choices will increase the decision time logarithmically. How does all this translate into the field of design? The more content we have on a website (or any marketing material for that matter), the harder it becomes for our audience to identify what to focus on, which results in unpredictable user behaviour.

On the flip side of this, there is usability and functionality. You want to have a visually appealing “sexy” interface that will draw users to your website. But we all know that it takes more than just window dressing to keep users on your website and offer a solid product that works. It takes a holistic design approach to achieve a good balance between these different levels of design.

Don Norman splits design in three levels in his brilliant book “Emotional Design”: visceral design, behavioral design, and reflective design. The idea is to find the right balance between these pieces. We talked about visceral design and the importance of creating a visually appealing product in the previous paragraph. Behavioural design is where the user interaction with your product comes in. It is the overall experience of using the product. It is based on ideas that are derived from behavioural science, which is a fascinating field that studies why people behave as they do. By investigating how people form habits and how they make decisions, it gives user experience designers amazing insight about how to implement user-centered functionality into a design. Finally, reflective design is the long term impact we create in user’s mind by the message, the culture and the meaning of the product that we convey.

Apple Pay and the Future of Mobile Shopping

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mote_slide_mobile-payment1Adobe’s Digital Marketing Blog is one of the greatest sources to follow the most recent news and trends on online marketing. An interesting article by Aseem Chandra about the rise of mobile shopping makes very compelling arguments about why retailers should be focusing more on mobile now than ever before. According to Adobe Digital Index’s forecast, online shopping on American Thanksgiving Day this year will reach 31% of total online sales, up from 21% last year. Chandra argues that there are two main reasons behind the rise of mobile shopping:

  • Larger screen sizes are allowing users to conduct transactions on their mobile devices much easier than before. If this is true, the new release of iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus will contribute to this phenomenon even further with the bigger screens.
  • In line with the new iPhones, Apple Pay is regarded as the solution that will remove all the obstacles to mobile shopping. Within the first 72 hours of its launch, Apple Pay had over one million credit cards registered with it, validating Chandra’s point.

Apple Pay seems to offer a very promising transition to a mobile payment system. Although still new and only available in the USA (with no plans to launch in Canada anytime soon), it is not hard to imagine that it will be the future of payment. The key strength of Apple Pay lies in its simplicity. Users don’t even have to wake their iPhones in order to make a transaction thanks to the near field transaction antenna thats built into the device. And with the breakthrough Touch ID technology, the transaction is securely completed, allowing for faster and secure payment. While it is still the early days of mobile payment, Apple is already building the system into its new devices such as the Watch that is due to be released in early 2015.

As Chandra notes in the article, it is important that retailers need to make sure they have the tech infrastructure to cater to the tech savvy users sooner rather than later. Despite the fact that it is still a new technology, it is without question that it will be the future of payment processing, which makes it crucial for retail stores to make sure they have the resources and the infrastructure to make the transition as smooth and as painless as possible.