Let the buyer beware

Martin Lindstrom was nine when he started building a Lego kingdom in his garden. At 11, he'd opened it to the public, and by the age of 12, he'd renamed it Mini-land, after a short visit from the Lego lawyers. He describes that moment as his first lesson in the importance of branding.

Twenty six years later, Martin is now a marketing expert, advising – and still occasionally upsetting – big companies. But for the last four years, his focus has been less on adverts, and more on what makes us buy. The results, published in his new book Buy-ology, are very revealing.

"I've always wanted to know things like, 'Why, in a world with less and less cigarette advertising, we smoke more and more',"

he says. "And four years ago I realised that to ask questions like that I needed to go much further."

After persuading eight multi-national companies to sponsor his work, he raised seven million dollars (Dh25m), hired 2,000 volunteers, 200 scientists and began asking: Why do we buy?

"No one has done this before because it's so incredibly complex and expensive," he laughs.

Using cutting-edge brain scanning equipment, Martin literally looked into the minds of thousands of volunteers; and by measuring brain activity, noted which adverts were having the most positive effect.

"There is a part of your brain called the nucleus accumbens," he says. "That is the craving spot or pleasure centre of the mind. This is activated when an advert is working.

"Using brain scanning techniques we discovered that people are irrational. Time after time, people would say one thing [about a product], and we'd look into the brain and see they were thinking the total opposite.

"We discovered that the best advertisers in the UK are the tobacco companies, followed by Guinness and Virgin," he says.

"These are the retailers who understand that we are emotional creatures and want to be seduced."

Martin has been fascinated by tobacco advertising for years. The advertising guru explains that he had never understood why, despite warnings on the packets and increasingly strict limits on advertising, people smoke more than ever.

"If you ask smokers, they say that warnings on packets discourage them from buying cigarettes. But our tests showed that what people say and what they actually think are two different things. In actual fact, those warnings make smokers want to smoke more. The words act as a graphic symbol that they associate with pleasure."

Martin also discovered that in some cases, advertising restrictions have made the tobacco brands more powerful.

"Silk Cut began to position its logo against a back ground of purple silk, when the cigarette advertising ban came in," he says.

"The logo became the silk. A survey in 1997 revealed that 98 per cent of customers could identify the product.

"Smokers now respond more positively to tobacco products, without a logo. They've learned to distrust the brand name itself, which they associate with the dangers of smoking. But their guards go down when the brand name is removed."

Martin adds that even our practical experience of products can be manipulated by our emotional relationship with the brand. "We labelled the same bottle of beverage with two different labels. When people saw the expensive label, they preferred the taste to the less expensive one even though they were the same. In the brain we could see that the person's pleasure levels went up, when they thought the wine was more expensive."

Considering the irrational nature of consumers, Martin wondered whether big companies were spending their advertising budgets wisely.

After asking his volunteers to watch an episode of the television programme American Idol, he discovered that two of the show's main sponsors were wasting their money.

"Ford, Coca-Cola and telephone company Cingular (now AT&T) sponsor American Idol, to the tune of 78 million dollars," he explains.

"But the volunteers showed less brand recognition of Ford, after seeing the show, than before."

Martin says the reason for this is simple.

"For many companies traditional advertising, with a logo at the end, is seen as the king of advertising. But in actual fact, subliminal messages are more powerful. During American Idol, Coca-Cola is present approximately 60 per cent of the time, in the form of set design and the bottle themselves, whereas Cingular pops in frequently and Ford use straightforward adverts in the breaks.

"Through brilliant integration, Coke painstakingly affiliates itself with the dreams, aspirations and starry-eyed fantasises of potential idols. Want to be high flying and adored? Coke can help.

"The biggest mistake companies make is that they think the consumer is 100 per cent rational," he adds. "They think we'll be triggered by discounts and logos. And yes, they may do for a short amount of time. But their loyalties will be as short as the percentage decrease. And in actual fact, the smaller your logo the more powerful it is."

To make it clear how emotionally attached we are to brands, Martin conducted an experiment. He compared how we felt about God, with our feelings for our favourite companies. He showed 65 volunteers, who had strong religious faiths, a mixture of commercial and religious images.

"When people viewed images associated with the strong brands – the iPod, the Harley Davison, the Ferrari and others – their brains registered the exact same patterns of activity as they did when they viewed the religious images," he explains. "There was no discernible difference between the way the subjects brains reacted to powerful brands than the way they reacted to religious icons and figures.

Martin believes that, 'in the future very powerful brands will be a religion'. "They will start to act like religions by implementing rituals. Inventing a common enemy, having a symbolic language – all those kinds of things. That's the reason companies such as Apple are already so successful. They've already got artificially created rituals to make you get emotionally involved with their brand. And the fantasy in your brain tells you that it won't taste or feel as good if the ritual isn't done the right way," he says.

Unsurprisingly, some companies aren't excited about Martin's research. In the last 18 months, he's had many tempting offers from tobacco companies to leave his work.

"They have a huge interest in stopping this project. They've contacted me many times. Their last email said, 'We know you don't want to work for us, but would you work with our marketing department?'"

But Martin is not going to be deterred. Currently working with governments, he wants to use his results to help make advertising bans and warnings more effective.

"Some of what we are working on is confidential. But I feel good about what I'm doing because it means this book is going to effect a change."