Confessions of a Corporate Shopaholic

I couldn’t put the book down and finished reading it within a day.  It’s the New York Times bestseller Buyology: How Everything We Believe About Why We Buy Is Wrong, by Martin Lindstrom.   Lindstrom is one of the world’s most respected marketing gurus, and he has been traveling around the world advising the biggest Fortune 500 companies, at least 300 days of a year.  Most of us believe that we are smart shoppers, and that we are careful with how we make our buying choices through conscious thinking.  In fact, we are far from there.  And as Lindstrom points out, we are actually getting worse and worse.

The better we think we are, the more we let our guards down, and the more vulnerable we are for everything happening around us.  One example, a supermarket with a whole stack of canned soups priced at $1.95 receives no customers.  The next day, the store puts up a giant sign saying “Maximum 6 cans per customer”, and the soups are flying off the shelf at the same $1.95 price tag.  Mind games working, huh?

On the book’s back cover, Lindstrom lists out a few intriguing questions:

• Why did so many people who took the “Pepsi challenge” say they preferred Pepsi, only to carry on buying Coca-Cola?
• Why do the majority of anti-smoking campaigns inadvertently encourage people to smoke?
• Why does the scent of melons help sell electronic products?

Lindstrom addresses all these questions with his main theme of neuromarketing.  We used to rely on old school questionnaires and focus groups to study what customers want.  The fact that more and more of these traditional studies failed miserably has led to the widespread effectiveness and popularity of neuromarketing.  It is very well a science for subjects’ brains to be scanned when shown various advertisements and marketing programs.  The results are startling, and in many cases, contradicts completely with what we would admit, on paper.

I find the topic of product placement and the American Idol example fascinating.  With Idol’s 3 main sponsors, Coca-Cola, AT&T and Ford, who do you think gets the most of their advertising money’s worth?  Who fails miserably?  Why do some product placements fail?  Do you remember Elliott places pieces of Reese’ Pieces candy to lure E.T. out of his hiding 19 years ago?  Tom Cruise with his Ray-Ban sunglasses in 1983’s Risky Business, Top Gun and the later Will Smith in Men in Black II?

In the next chapter, Lindstrom describes how mirror neurons are responsible for why we often unwittingly imitate other people’s behavior.  Apple and its iPod sensation.  Abercrombie & Fitch with their all gorgeous American popular teens image that is ever so irresistible for 14 year-olds.

Do subliminal messages exist?  Yes, but its power has little to do with the product itself.  Instead, it lies in our own brains.  Tobacco companies spend huge percentage of their marketing budget into subliminal brand exposure.  “…Philip Morris, for example, offers bar owners financial incentives to fill their venues with color schemes, specifically designed furniture, ashtrays, suggestive tiles designed in captivating shapes similar to parts of the Marlboro logo, and other subtle symbols that, when combined, convey the very essence of Marlboro – without even the mention of the brand name or the sight of an actual logo.”  It’s an irony that because of government bans, tobacco companies have been forced to develop a whole new set of marketing skills, a set that is now vastly copied by many other industries.  Don’t let yourself fall prey to them.

Other topics of ritual, superstition, faith, religion, our somatic markers, senses, and sex are expressly covered.  Does sex really sell, or are consumers too distracted from the steamy images that they have forgotten entirely about the product?  Is it the sex that is selling or is it the controversy?  Well the latter is actually the more potent factor, though mirror neurons explain why sex and beauty continues to be popular in advertising everywhere around the world.

I highly recommend Lindstrom’s book and it’s one of the best investments I had made, considering the subliminal messages I was put through from his various appearances on CNBC prior to my purchase.   We will continue to shop for sure, but if we can all at least remember bits and pieces of this mind-provoking book and pause for a while before we take out our credit cards, we can at least delay the unavoidably path of becoming worse and worse shoppers, as Lindstrom predicted.