NEURO MARKETING

ASSIGNMENT

IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE POST GRADUATE DEGREE

"MASTER OF FASHION MANAGEMENT (MFM)"

Department: Fashion Management Studies

Semester: 02

Submitted To: Dr. SANJEEV S MALAGE

Submitted By: Mukund Verma (MFM/19/456)

Shruti Jhunjhunwala(MFM/19/401)

Batch: 2019 – 21

NIFT Bengaluru
 CERTIFICATE
This is to certify that, Mukund Verma and Shruti Jhunjhunwala students of Masters of Fashion
Management, semester 2, Batch 2019- 2021 of National Institute of Fashion Technology (NIFT), Bengaluru
have successfully completed report on case study of “Application of Neuromarketing”, under the guidance
of Dr. Sanjeev S Malage towards the fulfillment of this project.

Dr. Sanjeev S Malage

Professor
Department of FMS

NIFT, Bengaluru
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
We express our sincere thanks to our project guide, Dr. Sanjeev S Malage, faculty of Masters of Fashion
Management Department, for guiding us right from the inception till the successful completion of the
project. We sincerely acknowledge him for extending his valuable guidance, critical reviews of project and
the report and above all the moral support he had provided to us with all stages of this project.

Mukund Verma

Shruti Jhunjhunwala
 Product Placement in movies, music videos and reality shows
Product placement in movies is as old as the medium itself. Even the pioneering Lumière brothers, two of
the world’s first filmmakers, included several appearances of Lever’s (now Unilever) sunlight soap in their
early short films. But product placement truly began to blossom in the 1930s. In 1932, White Owl Cigars
provided $250,000 worth of advertising for the 1932 film Scarface, on the condition that star Paul Muni
would smoke them in the movie. By the mid-1940s, it was rare to see a kitchen in a Warner Brothers film
that didn’t have a spanking-new General Electric refrigerator, or a love story that didn’t end in a man
presenting a woman with diamonds in a romantic display of undying devotion, the diamonds, of course,
being sponsored by the DeBeers Company.

There are four distinguished categories of product placement: the classic one, the corporate placement, the
evocative and the stealth placement.  

 The classic placement is the most common placement.

The product or the brand is just in the field of the
camera, as the shoes Converse in I, Robot (Alex
Proyas, 2004) or more recently the Porsche Cayenne in
Comme des Frères (Hugo Gélin, 2012). Sometimes the
product appears without asking the advertiser, it is not
very costly usually but this kind of placement can often
be invisible when a lot of brands are placed.  

 The corporate placement focuses on the brand

and not the product. It can be just someone
talking about the brand, or the presence of the
logo of the brand. In the “The Fifth element (Luc
Besson, 1997)” you can clearly see the
McDonald’s logo. This kind of placement is easy to
use but if often not visible or memorable.  

 The evocative placement is about subtlety. The brand won’t appear. The customer should recognize
a product from its shape, design without the name of the brand. For instance in the movie Le diner
de cons (Francis Veber, 1998), you can recognize that Daniel Prevost is drinking a Kronenbourg beer
wearing adidas clothes. The advantage of this placement is the subtlety but people not aware of
the brand won’t see the placement.

 Finally the stealth placement is the most difficult

to recognize. There is no logo, no brand name.
People don’t see the product placement. The
fashion clothes are often stealth placement. Some
cartoons and animated movies can also use this
kind of placement as Les aventures de Bernard et
Bianca (John Lounsbery, Wolfgang Reitherman,
Art Stevens, 1977. A stealthy placement can also be a smell, a fragrance like Givenchy for Audrey
Hepburn in the movie Paris When it sizzles (Richard Quine, 1964). These placements are present in
the credits.
According to a study conducted by PQ Media, in 2006, companies paid a total of $3.36 billion globally to
have their products featured in various TV shows, music videos, and movies. In 2007, this increased to
$4.38 billion and is predicted to reach a whopping $7.6 billion by 2010.That’s a whole lot of money, given
that this would be the first time that the effectiveness of product placement has ever been scientifically
tested or validated.

What’s with this relentless advertising assault? In part, it can be attributed to advertisers’ calculated end-run
against popular new technologies like TiVo, which allows viewers to skip over the TV commercials and
watch their favourite shows without interruption. “The shift from programmer-to consumer-controlling
program choices is the biggest change in the media business in the past 25 or 30 years,” Jeff Gaspin, the
president of NBC Universal Television Group, has been quoted as saying. In essence, sponsors are letting us
know that it’s futile to hide, duck, dodge, fast-forward, or take an extended bathroom break, and they’ll get
to us somehow.

But do they? Do all these meticulously planned, shrewdly placed products really penetrate our long-term
memory and leave any lasting impression on us at all? Or are they “wallpaper” ads, instantly forgettable.

By the time we reach the age of sixty-six, most of us will have seen approximately two million television
commercials. Time-wise, that’s the equivalent of watching eight hours of ads seven days a week for six
years straight. In 1965 a typical consumer had a 34% recall of those ads. In 1990, that figure had fallen to
8%. A 2007 ACNielsen phone survey of one thousand consumers found that the average person could name
a mere 2.21 commercials of those they had ever seen, ever, period. Today, if asked most people what
companies sponsored their favourite TV shows say, Lost or House or The Office —their faces go blank.
They can’t remember a single one.
A couple of reasons for this:

 The first and most obvious is today’s fast-moving, ever-changing, always-on media assault. (Pop-ups
and banner ads, cable TV, twenty-four-hour news stations, newspapers, magazines, catalogues etc.
are all vying for our increasingly finite and worn-out attention spans). As a result, the filtering
system in our brains has grown thick and self-protective. We’re less and less able to recall what we
saw on TV just this morning, forget about a couple of nights ago.

 Another reason is the pervasive lack of originality on the part of advertisers. s. There’s no originality
out there, it’s too risky. Uncreative companies are simply imitating other uncreative companies. In
the end, everyone’s a loser because we as TV viewers can’t tell one brand from the next.

A Study on Product Placement in American Idol and Ford’s Multimillion-

Dollar Mistake
American Idol has three main sponsors, Cingular Wireless (which has since been bought by AT&T), the
Ford Motor Company, and Coca-Cola, each of whom fork over an estimated $26 million annually to have
their brands featured on one of the highest-rated shows in television history.

As viewers, we used to be able to tell the difference between products that somehow play a role or part in a
TV show or movie (known in advertising circles as Product Integration) and the standard thirty second
advertising spots that run during the commercial breaks (known as, well, commercials). But increasingly,
these two kinds of ads are becoming harder and harder to separate.

On American Idol, Coke and Cingular Wireless not only run thirty-second ads during commercial breaks,
they also feature their products prominently during the show itself. (When asked by a fellow judge if he
liked a contestant’s song during the February 21, 2008, broadcast, Simon commented, “How much I love
Coca-Cola!”—and then took a sip.) The three judges all keep cups of America’s most iconic soft drink in
front of them, and both the judges and the contestants sit on chairs or couches with rounded contours
specifically designed to look like a bottle of Coca-Cola. Before and after their auditions, contestants enter
(or exit in a foul-mouthed rage) a room whose walls are painted a chirpy, unmistakable Coca-Cola red.
Whether through semi-subtle imagery or traditional advertising spots, Coca-Cola is present approximately
60% of the time on American Idol.

Cingular, too, pops up repeatedly throughout the show, though to a lesser extent. As the host, Ryan Seacrest,
repeatedly reminds us, viewers can dial in, or vote for their favourite contestant via text-message, from a
Cingular Wireless cell phone—the only carrier that permits Idol voting via text-messaging (text messages
from other cell phone providers are evidently discarded, meaning you either have to call in for a fee or
forever hold your peace). What’s more, the Cingular logo—which
looks like an orange cat splattered on a road—shows up alongside
every set of phone and text-messaging numbers shown onscreen. And
to further cement the relationship between the show and the brand, in
2006 Cingular announced it would begin offering ring tones of live
performances from the previous night’s show to download to their
mobile phones. The cost: $2.95.
Of the show’s three main sponsors, Ford is the only advertiser that doesn’t share an actual stage with the
contestants. Ford’s $26 million goes only toward traditional thirty-second ad spots (though in 2006 Ford
announced that it had hired American Idol Taylor Hicks to record a relentlessly up-tempo, feel-good song
for both TV and radio entitled “Possibilities” to promote the company’s new “Drive On Us” end-of-year
sales event). During the show’s sixth season, Ford also produced original music videos featuring the
company’s cars which ran during the commercial breaks in each of the final eleven shows and partnered
with the American Idol Web site for a weekly sweepstakes promotion.

But when Simon Cowell sips out of his Coca-Cola cup, Randy Jackson comments on the latest Ford and
Paula Abdul encourages everyone to cast a vote using AT&T, does it work? Quantitative and qualitative
statistics say it does, but does a couch shaped like a Coke bottle really make people consume more cola?
There is only one way to find answer: by understanding what really goes on in our subconscious.

Methodology
Steady-State Topography (SST):

SST could measure the degree of subjects’ emotional engagement; limbic system (how interested they were
in what they were watching), memory; amygdala (what parts of what they were watching were penetrating
long-term memory), and approach; Left frontal activity and withdraw; right frontal activity (what attracted
or repelled them about the visual image). It is essentially a refinement of EEG, with its possibility to
measure immediate reactions, allows for the real time recording of brain activities’ reaction to any
stimulant. Or in simple words SST would reveal “how different parts of the brain talk to one another.”

STUDY

They presented their brain-scan subjects with a sequence of twenty product logos, each one appearing for a
single second. Some were logos for various companies that aired thirty-second commercials during
American Idol, including Coke, Ford, and Cingular. They called these product placements “branded” logos.
They also showed their volunteers logos from companies that had no products placed within the show,
everything from Fanta to Verizon to Target to eBay. They referred to these as “unbranded” logos, meaning
they had no connection or sponsorship affiliation with the show. Then they showed their viewers a twenty-
minute-long special edition of American Idol, as well as an episode of a different show that would serve as a
benchmark to statistically validate their final results. When the viewers had finished watching the two
shows, they rescreened the precise same sequence of logos three times in a row. Their goal was to find out
whether viewers would remember which logos they had seen during the show and which ones they hadn’t.
Over the years, Neuromarketing research has found that consumers’ memory of a product, whether it’s
deodorant, perfume, or a brand of tequila, is the most relevant, reliable measure of an ad’s effectiveness. It’s
also linked with subjects’ future buying behaviour. In other words, if we remember Calvin Klein’s Euphoria,
and Don Julio Anejo tequila, we’ll be far more likely to reach for them the next time we’re in a store or add
them to our cart the next time we’re shopping online. So it made sense to compare the strength of subjects’
memories for the logos—both Branded and Unbranded—that they’d seen both before and after watching
American Idol.

RESULTS

First, in the before-the-program testing, it was found that despite how frequently the products from the three
major sponsors—Ford, Cingular Wireless, and Coca-Cola appeared in American Idol, the subjects showed
no more memory for these products than for any of the other randomly chosen products they viewed before
the study began. Meaning, the branded logos and the unbranded logos began the race on even ground.
After viewing the programs, subjects showed a significantly greater recall for the branded logos than for
unbranded ones. What’s more, the sheer potency of the branded logos, the ones that had placed their
products strategically throughout the program or advertised during the program had actually inhibited the
recall of the unbranded logos. In other words, after watching the two shows, subjects’ memories for the
branded logos, like Coke and Cingular, had crowded out memories of the unbranded ones, such as Pepsi and
Verizon.

The SST results showed that Coca-Cola was way more memorable than Cingular Wireless and far, far more
memorable than Ford. What was even more amazing was that Ford didn’t just do poorly. In its post-program
test, it was also discovered that after viewing the shows, the subjects actually remembered less about the
Ford commercials than they had before they entered the study. In other words, watching the Coke-saturated
show actually suppressed subjects’ memories of the Ford ads. The car company, it appeared, had invested
$26 million in yearly sponsorship—and actually lost market share.

FINDINGS

Coke permeated 60% of the show’s running time with its artfully placed cups, furniture evoking the shape of
its bottles, and Coke-red walls. Ford, on the other hand, simply ran traditional commercials that didn’t
intrude on the program at all. In other words, Coke was integrated fully into the narrative while Ford wasn’t
at all.

In short, the results revealed that we have no memory of brands that don’t play an integral part in the
storyline of a program. They become white noise, easily, instantaneously forgotten. When we see a
commercial showing Idol contestants merrily sponging down a Ford at a car wash, or crowding into a
vehicle like lunatic 1950s teenagers, we pay practically no attention to the product, because it’s clearly
“just” an ad.

Through subtle and brilliant integration, Coke, on the other hand, has painstakingly affiliated itself with the
dreams, aspirations, and starry-eyed fantasies of potential idols. Want to be high-flying and adored? Coke
can help. Want to have the world swooning at your feet? Drink a Coke. By merely sipping the drink onstage,
the three judges forged a powerful association between the drink and the emotions provoked by the show.
Similarly, Cingular became associated as the instrument through which contestants can either accomplish
their dreams or at the very least become a D-list celebrity. Ford, on the other hand, has no such archetypal
role whatsoever on American Idol. Viewers don’t link it with victory, defeat, dreams, adoration, klieg lights,
standing ovations, encores or anything other than gas, tires, highways, and automatic transmissions. Idol
contestants have no natural connection or aspirational affiliation with the brand so we, as viewers, have no
emotional engagement with it, either.

And products that play an integral part in the narrative of a program—like Coke and, to a lesser extent,
Cingular Wireless are not only more memorable, they even appear to have a double-barreled effect. In other
words, they not only increase our memory of the product, but they actually weaken our ability to
remember the other brands.

The SST study showed, for product placement to work, it has to be a lot slyer and more sophisticated
than simply plunking a series of random products on a screen and expecting us to respond.

BRAND RECALL AND EFFECTIVENESS

The more subtle the product placement is, the less they will recall it but the more they will be persuades to
buy it and the purchase intention will increase. With a prominent product, it is the reverse; they will recall it
but won’t buy it.
The consumer has to remember the product or the brand not explicitly but implicitly. The implicit memory
refers to the subconscious. You may not remember the product in the movie but when you will see the
product in stores for example it will remind you something.
The memory rate is the highest in the movie theatres therefore product placements in movie have a strategic
importance. In fact when you are in the cinema, you are well seated, there is no more background noise, the
sound is good, the screen is giant, and all the components are made for you to spend a nice moment. Instead
of feeling attacked by the commercial messages in common advertisement, in cinema you are more willing
to listen and remember.

To increase the memory rate and the recall of a brand, the product or brand has to be prominent.
Prominence can be in terms of space, time and number of appearances. If a product has a lot of physical
space like McDonald’s in The FiŌh Element (Luc Besson, 1997), or when someone talks about it a lot in
the dialogues, it is a prominent product. If a brand or product combines these three elements, the recall will
be higher. The brand has to be visible also, in the camera field and the best is integrated in the scenario.
Finally what can be an element to increase the brand recall is to create an emotional bond as Chanel did with
the movie Anastasia (Don Bluth, Garo Goldman, 1997).

 Hershey’s Reese’s Pieces:

Steven Spielberg’s E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial movie, the story revolves around a solitary, fatherless boy
named Elliott who discovers an extraordinary-looking creature living in the woods behind his house. To lure
it out of hiding, the boy tactically places individual pieces of candy, instantly recognizable as Hershey’s
Reese’s Pieces along the path from the forest leading into his house. Elliott didn’t just pop those Reese’s
Pieces into his mouth during a thoughtless bike ride with his buddies; they were an essential part of the
storyline because they were used to lure E.T. from the woods. A very smart corporate decision on Hershey’s
part, as it turns out, a week after the movie’s debut, sales of Reese’s Pieces tripled, and within a couple of
months of its release, more than eight hundred cinemas across the country began stocking Reese’s Pieces in
their concession stands for the first time.

 The James Bond saga:

James bond is a character invented by Ian Fleming in 1953. This character has been since very famous and
the saga of movies is the longer of the cinema with 26 movies. The last one Skyfall was released in 2012.
James Bond does not exist without certain products like his watch, his car, his favourite cocktail, his gun.
The brands that people link with James Bond are Omega or Rolex for the watches, Aston Martin for the car,
Walther PPK for the guns, Bollinger for the Champagne and Martini for the cocktail. Some recent critics
target James Bond a saga of too many product placements. Die Another Day (Lee Tamahori, 2002) has even
been nicknamed as “Buy Another Day” because of the amount of product placement. The movie got around
100 million of dollars in product placement with Aston Martin but also Ford for the Thunderbird of Halle
Berry, etc. Of course the numerous product placements in the saga and their growing evolution made people
talk but the movies managed to focus only on the most important products for the character. In fact in these
movies they highlight the main product placements in time and space. In Skyfall, we can easily see the
Walther, the Heineken beer, the Omega watch, the Bollinger bottle of Champagne, the Martini and we see
perfectly the Aston Martin which takes a big role in this opus.  
  Ray Ban:

Ray Ban is famous for two big product placement successes: Risky Business (Paul Brickman, 1983) and
Top Gun (Tony Scott, 1986) both with Tom Cruise.

The first partnership of Ray Ban with Tom Cruise was for Risky Business (Paul Brickman, 1983). Before
the movie, the annual sales of Wayfarer were only 18,000. With the product placement of the Wayfarer and
the presence of the model on the poster, they got after the movie a 50% increase in sales on this model.
360,000 pairs of Wayfarers have been purchased in 1983.

Following this success, they make another partnership with Tom Cruise for Top Gun (Tony Scott, 1986) for
the Aviators sunglasses. Again a success with an increase of the Aviators’ sales of 40% in the seven month
following the release of Top Gun (Renko, Product placement highlights – Ray‐Ban Aviator, 2010).

They again invested in Men in Black (Barry Sonnenfeld, 1997) for the model Predator 2 whose sales
increased by 300% to reach 5 million dollars after the movie. Each time Ray Ban chose to be a central
product, always present with the main characters, the heroes, and is often present in the official poster of the
movies which increase the awareness of the brand.

PRODUCT PLACEMENT IN BOLLYWOOD

In Bollywood, nothing stops a movie-goer from experiencing it as feeling like reality. The Indian audience is
so emotionally involved with onscreen actors that products used by actors themselves are believed to be
of superior quality and are viewed as being in style as favoured products, just from their appearance
alongside those favoured Bollywood actors in movies. The communication platform used to utilize the
branded-products in film scenes, are seemingly more realistic to which the audience is familiar with. 

When brands are showcased in Bollywood films, after their debut, the product's purchase rate often sees
an impactful increase in sales.  And in Bollywood, there are often a high number of brands appearing in a
film.  The highly successful movie ‘Ra One’ partnered with up to 25 brands in fact, which is also common in
the US, but typically with less overt exposures.  Movie-goers in Bollywood are not by the slightest annoyed
by product placement; instead this market audience believes branded products enhance the realism of the
movie.

CONCLUSION

What’s more, in order for product placements to work, the product has to make sense within the show’s
narrative. In other words, advertisers and marketers who blizzard us with brand after brand; a Mountain Dew
and a Dell laptop here, a GNC super vitamin and a Posturepedic mattress there, might as well light a match
to the millions of dollars they’ve spent on their ads. Unless the brand in question plays a fundamental part of
the storyline, we won’t remember it, period. And therein lies Ford’s multimillion dollar mistake.

Coca-Cola and Cingular had created reasons for their existence; Ford had struggled to find a solid and
justifiable role. What we learned was that if a brand is part of a story line, our brains will accept the role of
the brand and remember its presence. However, if a brand and its role don't support the story line, the
opposite will happen: Our brains will simply erase it. That's the way we survive and keep from ending up
like zombies, considering the average of 2,000 brand messages we are exposed to every day.

This Neuromarketing tool is a way for brands to be sure that their positioning match with the emotional and
recognition of the customers. Neuromarketing may determine an average amount of product placement
needed for a movie, the best products to use in specific categories of movies, the best association of products
and above all the best product placement for the consumers regarding their expectations. This also a way for
the consumers to know more about what they desire and why they want to buy a specific product. It can be a
win‐win situation.

In a nutshell, the product placement tool is very profitable for the movies and good strategy but the brands
using them should analyse more the effects of their products in the eyes of the customers by their category,
their place in the scenario, the others brands also present. With a better neuromarketing idea of the effects of
product placement, this tool may become more than just advertisement. It might create a better brand image,
improve the brand awareness and also allow the companies to adapt their product strategy regarding the
customers’ expectations. The quality is better than the quantity of product placements.

THE POWER OF SOMATIC MARKERS

A brief reflection on one of the most important academic hypotheses linking brain to behaviour:  the
somatic marker hypothesis. Antonio Damasio is a highly-influential neurologist and emotion
neuroscientist, whose work with brain-injured patients helped identify the importance of brain-based
processes in both the conscious and non-conscious components of decision making. Damasio and his
colleagues sought to understand why patients with damage to certain parts of their brains made decisions
differently from healthy individuals, and published extensively on the link between electrodermal activity
and choice.
Based on his work, Damasio posed the somatic marker hypothesis (SMH) as a way of explaining how the
brain and body work in concert with one another to lead individuals towards the decisions they make.

In short, the SMH suggests that decision making is actually a learning process. When we make a decision, or
a choice, and we experience the outcome, we will have some low-level (or even more overt!) emotional
response to that outcome. That emotional response is manifested as some series of bodily reactions, an
increase in skin sweat, a decrease in heart rate variability, an expression of emotion on our face – and
information about that response is stored as a “somatic marker” (soma meaning “body”) in the brain.

When an individual later finds themselves in a similar situation, or making a similar choice, the relevant
somatic markers are retrieved and provide information to help guide the decision process.

The SMH laid the groundwork for much of modern neuromarketing, by showing that we do not need to
image consumers’ brains, using something like functional MRI, to understand when they something is
getting an emotional response from them. Measures like electrodermal activity, although taken from the
periphery of the body, can directly reflect processes in the brain that are related to decision making.

This provided earlier neuromarketers with a means by which they could non-invasively gain more insight
into consumers’ behaviour, and which could be done in a scalable fashion.

If asked to describe how you came to your decision of what to buy, we’d probably shrug and reply
“Instinct,” or “No reason,” or “I just did.” But the real rationale behind our choices was in fact built on a
lifetime of associations—some positive, others negative—that we weren’t consciously aware of. Because
when we make decisions about what to buy, our brain summons and scans incredible amounts of memories,
facts, and emotions and squeezes them into a rapid response—a shortcut of sorts that allows us to travel
from A to Z in a couple of seconds, and that dictates what we just put inside our shopping cart. A recent
study conducted by German brand and retail experts, Gruppe Nymphenberg, found that over 50% of all
purchasing decisions by shoppers are made spontaneously—and therefore Unconsciously—at the point of
sale.
These brain shortcuts have another name: a somatic marker.

Antonio Damasio calls a somatic marker—a kind of bookmark, or shortcut, in our brains. Sown by past
experiences of reward and punishment, these markers serve to connect an experience or emotion with a
specific, required reaction. By instantaneously helping us narrow down the possibilities available in a
situation, they shepherd us toward a decision that we know will yield the best, least painful outcome.

These same cognitive shortcuts are what underlie most of our buying decisions. It took us less than ten
seconds to choose between two brands, based on a completely unconscious series of flags in our brain that
led you straight to an emotional reaction. All of a sudden, we “just knew” which brand we wanted, but were
completely unaware of the factors—the shape of the product’s container, childhood memories, its price, and
a lot of other considerations—that led to our decision.

But somatic markers aren’t simply a collection of reflexes from childhood or adolescence. Every day, we
manufacture new ones, adding them to the bulging collection already in place. And the bigger our brain’s
collection of somatic markers, whether for shampoos, face creams, chewing gums, breath mints, potato
chips, vodka bottles, shaving creams, deodorants, vitamins, shirts, pants, dresses, TVs, or video cameras, the
more buying decisions we’re able to make. In fact, without somatic markers we wouldn’t be able to make
any decisions at all—much less parallel park a car, ride a bike, flag a taxi, decide how much money to take
out of the ATM machine, plug a lamp into an electrical socket without getting electrocuted, or take a
burning casserole dish out of the oven.

For example, why do many consumers choose to buy an Audi over other cars with equally attractive
designs, comparable safety ratings, and similar prices? It might very well have something to do with the
company’s slogan, Vorsprung durch Technik. Many people outside of Germany or Switzerland know what
this means (roughly, it translates to “progress and/or head start through technology” U2 fans, of which I’m
one, will note that Bono murmurs the phrase at the beginning of the song “Zooropa”). But that’s not the
point. Most people will guess correctly that the phrase is German. Our brains link together “automobile”
with “Germany” with everything we’ve picked up over our lifetimes about top-of-the-line Teutonic car
manufacturing. High standards. Precision. Consistency. Rigor. Efficiency. Trustworthiness. The result: we
walk out of the showroom holding the keys to a new Audi. Why? We are rarely conscious of it, but the fact
is that in a world teeming with cars that are for the most part indistinguishable, a somatic marker that
connects Germany with technological excellence comes alive in our brain and ushers us toward a brand
preference.

Companies and advertisers work to deliberately create these markers in our brain.

Take TV commercials. If we’ve ever shopped for tires, we know that they all look the same—Dunlop,
Bridge- stone, Goodyear—nothing but a mind-numbing ocean of black
rubber. Yet we automatically make our way, say, to the store’s
Michelin section. We know we’re making the right choice but we can’t
really articulate why. In truth, our brand preference has very little to do
with the tires themselves, but instead with the somatic markers the
brand has carefully created. Remember the cute baby Michelin once
used in their advertising?

Or what about the Michelin man,

whose plump, round appearance
suggests the protective padding of
a well-made tire? And then there are the Michelin Guides, those
slender, authoritative, high-end travel and food guides (which the
company invented so that consumers would drive around in pursuit of
the best restaurants—and thus purchase more tires).

Point is, all these seemingly unrelated bookmarks deliberately forge certain associations—safety for our
child passengers; sturdy, reliable durability; and a high-quality, top-of-the-line, European experience. And
it’s these powerful associations that come together to shepherd us toward a choice that feels rational, but that
isn’t at all.

Professor Robert Heath, a British consultant who among other things has written extensively about somatic
markers, has examined the success of a brand of British toilet paper known as Andrex that outsells its
nearest rival, Kleenex, in the United Kingdom by an almost two-to-one margin. Both companies spend the
same amount of money on TV ads, both are of equally high quality, and both cost approximately the same.
Heath’s explanation for Andrex’s success? A small Labrador puppy. But what, pray tell, does a little dog
have to do with an eight-pack of toilet paper?
For years, Andrex has used its puppy mascot to advertise how “soft, strong, and very long” its toilet paper is.
In a series of commercials, the puppy is seen skidding down a snowy hill on a sheet of toilet paper; in
another, a woman holds the puppy while behind them a long lacy banner of Andrex toilet paper billows and
flutters behind a speeding car.

At first, the connection between puppies and toilet paper

seems obscure, kind of random. But as Heath writes,
“Puppies are linked with growing young families; puppies
are even linked to toilet training. The connections between
any of these concepts and the puppy associations can be
created and reinforced every time the ads are seen.” Heath
adds, “When faced with the need to buy toilet paper, the
average consumer will not stop and try to recall the ads to
mind. However, when they tap into their intuitive feelings
about the two brands, the likelihood is that they will come
up with a far richer set of conceptual links for Andrex than
for Kleenex. All they might do is ‘feel’ that Andrex is
somehow indefinably ‘better’ than Kleenex.”

For advertisers, it’s easy and inexpensive to create a somatic marker in consumers’ brains. Since somatic
markers are typically associations between two incompatible elements. In attempting to hook our attention,
advertisers aim to create surprising, even shocking associations between two wildly disparate things.
For Example, Tom Dickson resembles any midwestern, middle-aged suburban dad. But this suburban dad
has a rather out-of-the-ordinary job. He sells blenders. But that’s not what’s most bizarre about him. To
advertise the blenders, he has created a series of short videos, available on the Blendtec Blender Web site
(which have migrated virally over to YouTube), which open with the question “Will it blend?”—a concept
likely borrowed from Dan Aykroyd’s famous Saturday Night Live skit, in which he used a blender to
pulverize a sea bass. As viewers look on saucer-eyed, Tom Dickson proceeds to grind, chop, mash, mince,
puree, and annihilate a series of objects inside his kitchen blender. Bic lighters. A tiki torch. A length of
garden hose. Three hockey pucks. Even an Apple iPhone.

Every week, Tom Dickson makes it his mission to pulverize something new and seemingly unpulverizable.
Watching an iPhone whirl and clack until it’s been reduced to a smoking mass of black particles is, to say
the least, un-forgettable. It creates a somatic marker so dramatic in our brains that the next time we’re
whipping up a strawberry smoothie, we can’t help but think: wouldn’t the Blendtec Blender do a better job?
Our brains associate the brand of blender with the memorable image of an iPhone being ground into a
steaming pile of dust, and without even consciously realizing it; we’ve picked up the Blendtec box.

Because somatic markers are based on past experiences of reward and punishment, fear too can create some
of the most powerful somatic markers, and many advertisers are all too happy to take advantage of our
stressed-out, insecure, increasingly vulnerable natures. Practically every brand category we can think of
plays on fear, either directly or indirectly. We’re sold medicines to ward off depression, diet pills and gym
memberships to prevent obesity, creams and ointments to quiet fears of aging, and even computer software
to ward off the terror of our hard drives crashing. It is predicted that in the near future advertising will be
based more and more on fear-driven somatic markers, as advertisers attempt to scare us into believing that
not buying their product will make us feel less safe, less happy, less free, and less in control of our lives.

For a fear-driven somatic marker, it’s worth looking at Johnson’s No More

Tears Baby Shampoo. What does it evoke? Fear of the same thing it promises
to help you avoid: tears.

Similarly, an ad for Colgate toothpaste claiming that “emerging scientific research is associating serious
gum disease with other diseases such as heart disease, diabetes and stroke.” In short, brush with Colgate or
else you’ll die.

In his somatic marker hypothesis, Damasio proposes that every memory that is encoded and stored in the
brain is filed away alongside visceral information relating to the emotional content of that episode – a
‘somatic marker’.

When the memory is recalled, so is the way we felt and this serves as shorthand for incorporating
remembered associations into the process of rational decision-making. After all, the purpose of memory is
not to remember the past but to better predict the future.

However, when marketers communicate to customers as thinking machines rather than connecting

emotionally with feeling machines, we run the risk to be talking to the wrong part of the brain. We
tend to communicate to the rider, not the elephant in the decision-making process.

The elephant represents the limbic brain, one of the oldest parts of the brain in evolutionary terms; it is
emotional and driven by instinct.

The rider represents the ‘newer’ neocortex, the seat of conscious and rational thought; he is in control of the
elephant. The neocortex is largely driven by emotional inputs from limbic areas.

In other words: Should elephant and rider disagree on which direction to go, the elephant will always win
due to its power and size. For elephant and rider to move in harmony, the rider wants to motivate not force
the elephant through emotional appeals.

There’s neuroscientific evidence that we respond better to visual stimuli than the written word and
emotionally connect with brands when there’s a story that we can follow. But it goes beyond that.

Most brands communicate from the outside of the circle inwards, starting with what they do and
proceeding to explain how they do it. They are communicating to the neocortex; our rider.

Our brains can understand vast amounts of information including benefits and discounts, but that doesn’t
necessarily make us buy the product. Conversely, brands that start off with why they do what they do, are
capable of striking a chord with the limbic brain and establishing an emotional connection with the
elephant. 
This is what brands needs to do, both on and offline, prior, during and after their experience. They need to
create memories so strong that their customers become loyal advocates.

Of course, not all somatic markers are based on pain and fear. Some of the most effective ones are rooted in
sensory experiences, which in fact can often be quite pleasant.

Creating memories

How do we look, what colours do we use, fonts, paper stock, the uniform our staff wear, how do we
sound, how do we smell? Here are some examples from Lindstrom's work where brands have used the
senses to make a difference to the bottom line.

Smells

Brands work very hard to create a consistent smell in their environment, not just so it smells fresh but to
alter our subconscious. Anyone that has tried to sell a house was probably told to bake some bread and
put on a pot of coffee.

Go into any Abercrombie & Fitch store and the clothes all smell the same. Studies showed that you could
blind fold kids and put them in front of different jeans and they will pick out the Abercrombie pair, but this
smell burns that somatic market into their heads, a brand experience is born.

Sony’s Flagship store pumps the smell of melon into it, turns out this is a tested and winning combination
that has made customers stay calm and apparently buy more.

The Hyatt hotel chains spray lobbies and rooms in their own signature smell, so no matter which one we are
in we are welcomed with their unique and familiar smell.

Sounds

A study conducted back in 2006, concluded that sound changed behaviour. When in supermarkets they
played the music robberies dropped by 33%, assaults on staff dropped by 25% and vandalism dropped by
27%. Super marketers filter in music with different temps to make us walk and shop quicker, or influence
our buying.

Pump in French music to the wine section and sales of French wine will go up, do the same for German
music, your German wine will sell.

What somatic markers can be created for a brand?

You don’t have to be a huge brand with a huge budget to put some of this thinking into practice.

Have a think about the target audience, visit your personas, what will work as a hook and how can you get
them to create stronger memories and impressions both online and offline, some discussion ideas:

What music would work best on your company video?

What colour would work best on your website?

When you send out a direct mail campaign, would adding a texture make a difference?

When you have a face to face experience what could you change to your environment?
CONCLUSION

Emoti ons are a major factor in the interacti on between environmental conditi ons and human
decision processes, with these emotional systems (underlying somatic state activation) providing valuable
implicit or explicit knowledge for making fast and advantageous decisions. Thus the somatic marker view
of decision-making is anchored in the emotional side of humans as opposed to the construct of
homo economicus. Although the view of  maximizing uti lity of decision-making is pervasive
and has a useful benchmark functi on, human decision-makers seldom conform to it. The
process of deciding advantageously is not just logical but also emotional.

BIBLOGRAPHY

Bibliography
Lehu, J.-M. (2009, March 1). Sage Journals. Retrieved from https://journals.sagepub.com:
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/205157070902400102

Lindstrom, M. (2008). Buyology.

Renko, E. (2011, January 13). brandsandfilms. Retrieved from brandsandfilms:

brandsandfilms.com/2011/01/top-40-product-placements-of-all-time-10-1/

FELIX, S. (2012, October 12). BusinessInsider. Retrieved from BusinessInsider:

https://www.businessinsider.com.au/heres-how-james-bonds-relationship-with-product-placement-
has-changed-2012-10#bond-opted-for-a-red-stripe-rather-than-his-signature-vodka-martini-during-
his-first-flick-in-1962-pan-am-and-smirnoff-also-made-appearances-i