The Buying Brain: Secrets for Selling to the Subconscious Mind (30 page)

We have found this neurological highlighting and scoring of innovation concepts can minimize and reduce the risks of marketplace failure.

Capturing the NeuroMetrics data serves another important purpose. There is a traditional fear in the mind of marketers: if a product seems too new, it may not do well in the marketplace. We have found that for new products, there is a need for balance between high levels of novelty and high levels of purchase intent. If one were to assume the classic four-box with purchase intent along the X axis and novelty along the Y axis we would see products or services that have both high levels of novelty and purchase intent. These become the natural first tier of products for innovation.

Many of our clients have also performed traditional research that includes surveys and focus groups on the effectiveness of these concepts. Consequently, we have created a very interesting resonance and dissonance matrix where the X-axis represents the neurological effectiveness and the Y-axis represents the articulated effectiveness. See Figure 13.1.

The northeast corner is a quadrant that represents the greatest level of cognitive response. That is to say, the items in that box are the ones with the greatest neurological and articulated effectiveness. The concept resonates in the subconscious and the conscious.
We consider these “the next big
idea.”
The concepts in the box to the left of that, which are concepts with low neurological effectiveness and high articulated responses, are usually red flags.

These are ones that enable people to confirm something they either want to believe or already know about themselves but are deeply emotionally opposed to. These concepts, while apparently having a level of marketplace appeal, are eventually doomed to fail in the marketplace through a lack of genuine deep consumer acceptance. We urge our clients to be wary of these prophets bearing false success, because they require major surgery on the concept.

The third box is the one with high neurological effectiveness and low articulated enthusiasm. These are concepts that people truly enjoy but are reluctant to admit openly that they enjoy them. In these cases it is vital (and easy) to fine-tune the concept by changing the packaging. The clever change of the name, making it more socially acceptable, will result in easily fine-tuned marketplace success.

In the last quadrant are the concepts that have poor neurological effectiveness and articulated displeasure—these are guaranteed marketplace failures, to be avoided entirely.

Our application of neuroscience to test innovation concepts has yielded remarkable success, leading to both the methodology and the neuroscience

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Figure 13.1

When neurological and articulated responses are high,
look for a big idea

Source:
NeuroFocus, Inc.

becoming part of the innovation pipeline and new product tollgate process in a number of companies.

In addition to identifying innovation concepts, this method of benchmarking and creating the overall NeuroMetrics for innovation serves yet another critical purpose. Many times the
translation of the concept into a product
is flawed.
That is to say, a great and brilliant concept eventually was stripped of its brilliance, its features warped, and its objective destroyed through the process of execution when the concept came to life as a product or service.

Many companies have started using our NeuroMetrics throughout the process of innovation to ensure that the same level of effectiveness defined through NeuroMetrics scores, which mark the birth of a concept at its inception, are not degraded throughout the process of translating the concept into a product P1: OTA/XYZ

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The Buying Brain

and its associated marketing. The consistent use of the same set of NeuroMetrics from the inception of the concept through the various stages of the execution into a product or service guarantees that the original intent and novelty of the concept is not lost but maintained throughout the process.

The chapter on Advertising outlines the power that neurological testing can bring to that branch of marketing. Given how critical advertising is for the introduction of new products into the marketplace, it merits special mention here.

If you know the features that appeal the strongest . . . if you know the optimum positioning . . . the best-received packaging design elements . . . the highest-scored name . . . the price that consumers will find most acceptable . . .

if you know, with scientific precision, how your customer’s brain will respond
before
you create the ad campaign,
you go into that process with a distinct
competitive advantage.

If you’re going to make the kind of major investments in any or all of the above categories that most new product launches demand it makes the most business sense to optimize your chances for success. Knowledge is not only power—in the case of new product introductions, it also means cold hard cash and, nine times out of ten, life and death.

Failure Analysis: Six Reasons

Products Fail

We have been called in many times by companies to investigate why a new product launch failed. Sometimes it was the result of the product itself, its packaging, its ad campaign, its in-store execution, perhaps competitive action, and sometimes several of these factors combined. In each case,
there are as many lessons to be learned from product launch failures
as there are to be learned from product launch successes.
When we have used neuroscientific analysis to study product launch failures we have come across certain specific criteria:

Failure Reason #1: the concepts were chosen based on articulated intent rather than consumers’ deep subconscious responses.

Failure Reason #2: the appropriate trade-off between novelty and purchase intent was not made.

Failure Reason #3: NeuroMetrics of the marketing campaign revealed that the deep emotional benefits of the product were not successfully articulated through the campaign.

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Failure Reason #4: NeuroMetrics of the execution of the product concept through the product itself and its associated packaging were substantively lower than the NeuroMetrics of the concept. In other words, the loss of concept innovation in the process through to execution noted above.

Failure Reason #5: product features and packaging did not present a substantive competitive barrier, which in turn, enabled launch of competitive products that were better from a NeuroMetric standpoint.

Failure Reason #6: the Deep Subconscious Response to the product or service was disconnected from the subconscious response to the core brand attributes. In other words, the product or service was emotionally disconnected from the brand.

It is, therefore, important not only to understand how to launch products successfully but to look at the litany of woes associated with poorly launched products and services and reexamine them through the lens of neuroscience to see what was successful and what was not—
and why.

When a new product fails, sophisticated companies conduct a marketing postmortem to determine why. Learning from failures is, obviously, an excellent way to avoid them in the future. But, it is devilishly difficult after the fact to deconstruct all of the individual components that go into the conceptual-ization, development, production, and marketing of a new product, and have confidence in the accuracy of the results.

By probing the subconscious for answers,
you add an entirely new
source of insight and understanding.
It is the commercial equivalent of trying to comprehend the cosmos through a land-based telescope. Peering through our layered atmosphere that necessarily distorts the image, versus soaring high above the Earth and gaining as clear and unobstructed a view into the depths of space as can be had by the human eye.

In the book
Fundamental Neuroscience
, Floyd E. Bloom said, “As we begin the twenty-first century, the Hubble Space Telescope is providing us with information about as yet uncharted regions of the universe and the promise that we may learn something about the origin of the cosmos. This same spirit of adventure is also being directed to the most complex structure that exists in the universe—the human brain.”

I posit that neuromarketing is to marketing as the Hubble telescope is to astronomy: a quantum leap forward toward far greater knowledge and insights attained with scientific precision and certainty.