Online advertisers and search marketers have it easy: They get instant feedback on how well their key words pull prospective customers. Or, which pay-per-click ad description draws more clicks to a web site. Or, whether the clickable graphic in a display ad draws more eyeballs if it shows a woman wearing a bracelet, or if it shows a picture of the disembodied jewelry. All they need is a good Web Analytics package, plus someone who likes to crunch numbers, click-through rates, conversions to sale and glitzy reports. Easy.
See examples of all the above easily trackable search and display ads for the Wholesale merchandise industry at Top Ten Wholesale Advertising .
What marketer wouldn’t like to know what really goes on in the mind of an ad target? Web Analytics software can’t figure out what made someone click one search listing over another, or why a sales prospect reacted to one ad and not another on the same page. Enter Martin Lindstrom, author of “Buyology,” who does a Dr. Frankenstein set up called neuro-imaging in a lab that actually measures people’s brain waves as they look at marketing messages. No need to even ask them what they like or dislike; what turns them on or off.
Yes, Halloween just passed; but this is real. Call it “Brain Analytics.” Lindstrom’s conclusions:
· A strong brand trips a kind of religious reaction. Neuro-imaged brand maniacs – like Mac vs. PC users; or drinkers who knew the beer on the beach blanket with a lime wedge is a Corona before the label is even seen – showed the same brain waves as when they saw religious icons.
· Don’t buy the old adage, Sex Sells. Because it only sells sex. Fewer than one in ten men who saw a sexually suggestive ad could remember what the product was; twice as many subjects recalled the product in unsexy ads.
· TV ads may be self-defeating. By the time they turn 60, most viewers have been exposed to 2,000,000 TV commercials. The study concluded that traditional ads have caused a sort of brain fatigue and are no longer memorable.
· Successful advertising doesn’t work only through the eyes. Other senses that strongly influenced offline buyer behaviors: Hearing (European shoppers bought French or German wines, depending on which country’s national anthem was playing when they shopped!). Smell (In-store bread bakeries; Fast-food restaurants that use artificial food smells, like bottled “French fry aroma”).
· Last, don’t tell the rich product placement managers at film and TV studios, but using a product as a background prop on a set gives back no brand recall from viewers. (Examples are a Yellow Book Directory propped near Ben Stiller’s computer as he looked for help in “Night In the Museum,” and tossing FedEx branded express packages on the set of a James Bond Film.) The placed marketing message only worked if the product and brand were written into the story. (Think Reese’s Pieces candy used to attract an alien in the movie “E.T.: The Extraterrestrial.”)
