Your life as a marionette with a credit card
I just started Buyology (Martin Lindstrom, 2008 Doubleday). I didn’t want to buy this book (the title seemed overreaching to me). Why did I? Now that I’m on page 85 I turn warily to the mustard yellow-coloured cover - did my subconscious have a role in this? Why yellow?
Ok I’m over it now .. and glad I bought the book. For neuromarketing, this is a fast-paced racing car of a book, and a great read (so far).
Here’s the bit that got me wanting to blog right away:
“… In 1997, in preparation for the ban on tobacco advertising that was about to come into place in the United Kingdom, Silk Cut, a popular British Tobacco brand, began to position its logo against a background of purple silk in every add it ran. It didn’t take long for consumers to associate this plain swath of purple silk with the Silk Cut logo, and eventually with the brand itself. So when the advertising ban came into effect, and the logo was no longer permitted on ads or billboards, the company simply created highway billboards that didn’t say a word about Silk Cut or cigarettes but merely showcased logo-free swaths of purple silk.”
I think we can agree that this is the world of big, branded products where few have any say. And thankfully so. Who’d want to spend their workdays cooking up plans like this.
The point I want to make out of this is that we all buy products (and services) for reasons other than those listed on the box. Putting aside subconscious reasons for now (with all due respect for Mr. Lindstrom), what about the conscious ones? Even they are more nuanced than we think: functional (what product does), personal (how it makes us feel), or social (how it makes others feel about us), as Anthony Ulwick puts it in his outcome-driven innovation methodology.
Nuanced or not, we can and should figure out why our customers buy (or don’t buy) our products now. One thing’s for sure: it’s way less costly than doing nothing, or worse - customer blind product reengineering - which is what some companies consider first when sales aren’t where they expect.
Great post.
I was in a marketing workshop at Kellogg last year and we talked a bit about these concepts. Someone in the class tried to argue that only functional criteria mattered when in a B2B sales situation. Nothing could be further from the truth in my opinion. Business buyers are afraid of getting fired, afraid of challenging the status quo, and are interested in looking “smart” and “cutting edge”. Companies need to take a realistic view of the non-functional decision criteria that buyers have if they want to take market share.
April
Thanks April.
Re non-functional: here’s a quote from Guy Kawasaki’s book Reality Check (Portfolio, 2008) in which Guy interviews Scott Berkun, author of The Myths of Innovation (O’Reilly Media, 2008).
Guy: What are the primary determinants of the speed of adoption of innovation?
Scott: The classic research on the topic is Diffusion of Innovation (Free Press, 2003) by Everett Rogers, which defines factors that hold up well today. The surprise to us is that they’re all sociological: based on people’s perception of value and their fear of risks—which often has little to do with our view of how amazing a particular technology is. Smarter innovators know this and pay attention from day one to who they are designing for and how to design the website or product in a way that supports their feelings and beliefs.
Tom