If You Could Read My Mind, Love
Frito-Lay is redesigning many of their salty snack bags to better appeal to women, who actually snack MORE than men, and not on the same salty stuff, either. To figure all this out, and capitalize on the trend, they turned to neuromarketing–literally getting into the heads of their customers.
It’s the next big thing. Researchers use MRI technology to see how your brain actually reacts to stimuli (like the color of the type, or a picture of a cat), rather than relying on verbal response. That’s refreshing, since we’ve all sat through deceiving focus groups where you just KNEW the subjects weren’t saying what they really felt. In the Frito-Lay example, they “discovered” that women have a higher capacity for “communication” than men.
Well, duh. Men figure that out as soon as they get married. But this led them to change the way they communicate with women, readdressing the issue of guilt, and totally changing the packaging, copy and in some cases the flavors and names of the snack brands.
It’s hard to argue against the insights; they came from inside somebody’s head! And it’s hard to argue against the subsequent psychological principles that make the creative stick: Priming (preparing the brain to recognize stimuli) and Assimilation (processing that stimuli). There’s a great example of how this works in the 2004 issue of Neuron: “Neural Correlates of Behavioral Preference for Culturally Familiar Drinks.” You can probably find it in the magazine rack at your neurosurgeon’s office, right next to “Children’s Highlights Mensa Edition.”
They read the brain response of consumers taking the Pepsi Challenge, and found that 50% preferred the taste of Pepsi without additional stimuli, but when consumers knew they were trying Coke the numbers dropped. It wasn’t the taste; it was the “assimilated” imagery driven into their brains by great Coke advertising over the years.
I can’t wait to tell my mother about this. She always says what I do “ain’t rocket science, honey.” Nope. It’s more like brain surgery.
