Raw Notes from Neuroscience Marketing at SXSW - William Hertling's Thoughtstream

#bigbrotherinyourbrain
#sxswi

emotion is necessary for cognition
story about road trip, got drowsy, and pulled over at road stop. got a feeling to lock the doors, and she says to her friend to lock the door. later, a truck driver tried to get into the car.

this was actually a subconcious emotional reponse: some piece of sensory input was processed by the brain, to create an emotion, which inspired the decision to lock the door

story of experiment with decks of cards, some more positive than others
subjects would subconsciously respond to the deck, would sweat more when pulling from a negative deck.
but they had no conscious strategy.

mesolimbic dopamine system… controls how the brain processes sensory input and how much the sensory input is paid attention to

“the database of intentions, a living artifact of immense power” – john battelle, federated media publishing
google will eventually pass the turing test
google uses eye tracking to see how customers

talk about networks processing sensory input. activation levels of networks is the basic architecture

20% had very positive impact -> 100% increase
20% had moderate positive impact -> 50% increase
20% had small positive impact (20% increase), 20% had no impact, 20% had small negative impact (20% decrease)

Some people react positively, and some react negatively.
Did an ad for cadillac, put a woman in a sexy situation. 39% sales increase. not overt, not objectifying.
humor can work.
some of it can be able creating discomfort. old spice ad…. sexy, humor, discomfort. making fun of marketing. irreverence.
an easy laugh isn’t always the best way to go, nor is overt sexuality.

People were asked to choose from among tents on Amazon.com. Experimenters changed the order for each test. the one in the first position sold at 2.5x the rate of any others, regardless of qualities of the product.

If you have an existing expensive product, you can make a second product which is inferior, but almost as expensive as the expensive product, and this will cause the expensive product to sell more.

Putting a pretty girl on a flyer caused home mortgage customers to choose a significantly higher interest rate mortgage.

The brain hates straight lines and jagged lines. Apple products have almost none of either. The brain likes 3-5 things. A web page with more than 3-5 image groups confuses the reader.
We pay the most attention to faces that are hard to decipher. Faces reveal emotion, emotion reveals intent. The primative creative inside me wonders if the person next to me is going to attack me. If a person is smiling, I can ignore them. If the person has an undecipherable expression, it is computationally too difficult to figure it out. The brain spends more time dwelling on it. Supermodels walking down the runway always look a little pissed. An expression that is hard to decipher makes them memorable. Great artists figured this out. The Mona Lisa would not be the Mona Lisa if she was smiling.

What are the 3 big things we can learn from neurscience, that we couldn’t just learn from behavior studies?

If you ask people what part of a 30 second commercial they liked, it is very hard to do.
If you asked people which part of a piece of music, which part is emotionally provocative. We don’t have the language to express it. But with neuroscience, we can figure it out, so we can recreate it.
neuroscience does not necessarily discover new principles, but it allows you to narrow in and focus on what is the most provocative.

the moment between moments is most provocative for the brain. the brain goes nuts.
the most provocative moment when eating chips and salsa, it turns out to be the moment of lifting the salsa covered chip to your mouth with the expectation that it will momentarily be in your mouth. the chip needs to have a curve to hold the salsa, the salsa had to have a certain thickness and chunkiness. this can be discovered with neuroscience. and this attention to detail is what steve jobs does with every aspect of apple products.

what is more important than number or order is context and primacy.
primacy can be the connection to what has been before.
1, 2, 3 is important.
in the old days, if you were in the jungle, if there was a herd of animals, you had to evaluate if you had found dinner or you were going to be dinner. so we can quickly evaluate 3 to 5 or less, or “a lot”.

computer analogy: the computation/analysis happens in hardware for 3 to 5, and in software for more than that.

common thing for parent to tell children to do their homework, have dinner, watch tv, go to sleep.
should flip the order: watch tv, then dinner, then homework.
because during the REM cycle, the brain processes input, and it processes what it did last… so if they watch TV before bed, they process the TV. if they do homework before bed, they process homework.
would like to see us marketing science to kids
(will: it seems to me that this could be true of adults as well. do something educational right before bed…)