Will marketers read our minds in the future? That’s an argument one could make after looking at Martin Lindstrom’s “Buyology.” He got several corporations to fund a large-scale study involving brain imaging to look at what he thinks will change branding: neuroscience.
In this excerpt, you can see Lindstrom’s argument that good branding triggers the same neural responses as religion. (Or see this BNET Book Brief on Buyology.)
Lindstrom won’t be the first to hold that people can become religious about products, though he seems to have a tourist’s sense of religion.
Still, his data is intriguing. It is interesting that people identify more strongly with brands that tell stories than with brands that don’t, and potentially more interesting still that logos seem to detract from the power of branding messages.
But beware: He waves his little neurotechnology wand as though it were some sort of truth serum. The technologies used, fMRI and SST, are useful, but also limited. They are not perfect windows into the mind. Nor does one study, which appears to be unpublished, emphatically prove anything.
So just because the brain reacts in similar fashion to stories, whether religious or brand-oriented, does not mean that branding is thus akin to a religious experience. In fact, we would expect the part of the brain that lights up for stories of God to light up for stories told by a clever company like Apple. And so what? The stories will light up the brains of atheists, too, but that doesn’t make them believers, any more than it makes consumer buy a product.
Lindstrom’s book seemed coy. But I am looking at it more closely now, because of these excerpts and this interview, with its thought-provoking discussion of the ethics of neuromarketing and how communities of consumers affect brands.
