Entrevistamos Martin Lindstrom, futurologista de marcas, guru de branding e autor do livro Brandsense - A Marca Multisensorial.
AE - Who is Martin Lindstrom?
Martin Lindstrom-I'm an ordinary consumer, just like everyone else, with a very strong passion - and some may say - very deep insight into the world of branding and advertising due to my high level work with Nestle, Microsoft, the Walt Disney Company, Procter & Gamble, Reebok and Unilever. I'm also a person with an inbuilt curiosity - perhaps reflecting many of my global multi-million dollar research projects exploring consumers and our senses using some of the most sophisticated brain research techniques in the world.
It may sound ironic - but I am just as everyone else affected by brands. It's not like I have a magical bullet which protects me from commercial messages - and even though I might be more critical towards what I'm exposed for I still buy brands, watch commercials and shop like everyone else.
AE - What motivated you to follow this line of research?
Martin Lindstrom - It has been clear for me over the past years that the majority of decisions we make as a consumer takes place in our subconscious mind. Today we estimate that 85% of all the decisions we make every day are made in our subconscious mind - yet the majority - if not all communication appeals to the conscious part of our brain. It simply doesn't make a sense which is the reason why I in 2004 commenced what has turned out to become the largest NeuroMarketing study in the world.A study combining marketing with science in order to shed some light on what really goes on in the consumers mind as we buy brands.
AE - How was the word "Buyology" created?
Martin Lindstrom: It was a 10 months long process - involving my agent, two external agencies, my copywriter team, my publisher, my writer and myself. A lot of titles were developed - at a last count 600 different book titles however none of these seemed to catch. Latterly in the 11th hour my editor came up with the idea inspired from a conversation he'd had at a dinner party pitching the book - everyone was in total agreement about the title and thus the term buyology was born.
AE - Did the research have its focus on five senses or is it more widely?
Martin Lindstrom: One of the key focus areas were to explore the true importance of our senses - as a reflection of this we conducted a major sensory experiment using fMRI in Oxford, England as the first in the world in order to find out the true influence of our senses when buying brands.
Buyology however explores a range of other related topics like the future of the logo (which by the way doesn't seem to promising according to the Buyology study), the true effect of product placement (it doesn't work at all) or sponsorships (forget it), the correlations between brands and religion (there is one), does subliminal advertising exist (the answer is yes) and does it work (you bet yea!) - does NeuroMarketing work (we've proven that it does) and what is the importance of our senses (amazingly powerful). So as you can gather - the sensory part is there but far from the topic of the entire book.
AE - What was discovered in relation to Olfaction?
Martin Lindstrom: That the sense of smell is substantial more powerful in order to build brands than first anticipated. In fact we've learned that the sense of smell activates more regions in the brain than if you use the sense of sight - and we've learned that there is an amazing positive synergy taking place if you expose consumers for both the sense of smell and sight - a synergy so powerful that we're not only talking about 2+2 is 4 but more 2+2 is 10.
AE - Our blog is about Olfactory Marketing and Olfactory Identity. In your opinion, what is the relationship between brand and flavour?
Martin Lindstrom: There are two different dimensions. – one - the straight forward dimension - i.e. using the sense of taste to build a strong brand signature - like Listerine or Colgate. But there's another dimension which is just as important if not more - the imagination of taste - generated by using illustrations, colours and other sensory touch point. We're today close to develop techniques enabling us to show a picture and as a result of that stimulate a perceived taste in our mouth. Or expose a consumer for a sound - and make us get a sense of the taste of it. This is ground-breaking stuff as this may enable us to use one sense to stimulate another and thus create cross over effects which means that we over time in principal can sample food products just using the sense of smell.
AE -Considering the five senses, which one affect more in the final decision of the consumer?
Martin Lindstrom: In BRAND sense I concluded that the most important sense of them all was the sense of smell - followed by the sense of sight - I was wrong. You see the problem with research like that was that we asked consumer questions - and often - as you know - it's almost impossible to express what we smell, tasting or touching. That's the reason why NeuroMarketing made sense - and the results were absolutely mind-blowing. We learned that across all the senses (and product categories) the most important sense is the sense of sound - followed by the sense of smell - then followed by the sense of sight. Considering the fact that 83% of brands today only appeals to the sense of sight - it is clear that there's an enormous opportunity for companies across the world to leverage the senses in a far more systematic way.
AE- You talk about "NeuroMarketing". Can you explain this terminology?
Martin Lindstrom: It is a new term - less than a decade old. It is a marriage between science and marketing - a highly controversial marriage - which on one hand takes decades of insights from the scientific world and combines this with the experiences from the marketing world. As a result we've begun to look into our subconscious mind in ways never done before - among other understanding what the true influence of our senses are when purchasing brands.
AE- In your research, you talk about hidden motives, needs and desires that our conscious mind doesn't understand. How it was detected?
Martin Lindstrom: One of the most disturbing and surprising discoveries in Buyology was a study on health warnings on cigarette packs. I decided to look into these based on the fact that we smoke 13 percent more over the past three years. From a rational point of view it's hard to understand considering the fact that tobacco advertising has been banned for more than a decade, we today know it is unhealthy to smoke and it's almost impossible to smoke indoor. It was on the basis of this I decided to look into the health warnings to understand what affect they have on smokers. What we learned was that health warnings not only have failed to work - they in fact encourage smokers to light up another cigarette. You could say that the health warnings are the tobacco industry's secret killer marketing weapon. This discovery not only indicates that what we think and feel is in sharp contrast - it also indicates that conventional marketing - like quantitative and qualitative research techniques has failed uncovering issues like this simply of that reason that it all takes place in our subconscious mind.
AE- In your opinion, the Olfactory Marketing can be considered a revolution in the market brands or one more fashions?
Martin Lindstrom: I'm not only convinced that olfactory marketing is a breakthrough - and believe that the entire concept of sensory branding - i.e. leveraging several if not all of our senses is a revolution. I'm saying "several" because we've learned from the Buyology project that senses are working much more together than first thought - and thus separating these into the sense of smell - does not make sense
- they have to work together in order to generate a congruent effect.
AE- Could the use of excessive odours make the opposite effect? Do you think it can create barriers or dull the choice?
Martin Lindstrom: Most defiantly - in fact the Buyology project proved this as we established experiments where we exposed consumers for conflicting smells and pictures. I.e. a picture of a Coca-Cola logo combined with the smell of Dove - the results were a dramatic incongruent effect. I.e. 2+2 is 1 - and thus tearing down the entire brand.
AE- How do you see the market of Olfactory Marketing?
Martin Lindstrom: Extremely positive - in particular now when we finally know that it is no longer just a myth that it works - we can now finally prove it from a scientific point of view - all helping to create strong enough evidence helping brands to understand the true power of our senses.
Nós do blog Aroma Essencial agradecemos a forma atenciosa e rápida com que Mr. Martin nos atendeu e concedeu esta entrevista.
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