Why they buy

What really goes on in the mind of the consumer.

We’ve always known-and certainly we’ve always felt- that people often make decisions based on gut reactions rather than available data and considered analysis, on the logic of the senses rather than on reason and judgment.

Now we know for sure, thanks to the same biotechnology revolution that has deciphered the human genome and accelerated the science behind countless medical advances. Scientists have peered into people’s brains and convened plugged-in focus groups to study not what people say they think but what they actually think.

Almost as important, we’re learning where those impulses come from: Much of human nature, it turns out, is hard-wired through evolution in a way that relates directly to sensory-emotive logic. It’s an insight that challenges the past 300 years of Western thought-not to mention the entire history of marketing.

What does this mean to you? It means that business models that assume that consumers follow a conscious, rational decision-making process are faulty. People Wim? to he rational consumers-hut they can’t help themselves.

In effect, Mercedes-Benz can run all the advertising it wants championing the automaker’s superior German engineering, but is there any doubt that the hook lies in its emotional, non-rational, ego-affirming appeal? The same holds true for Rolex, whose watches signal success. Both of these companies might run print ads touting the craftsmanship of their products, hut when you meet a true devotee of either brand, you quickly understand that the affection is much more emotional than rational. The emotional affirmation that these products provide feels good enough that few of us would ever attempt to validate this buzz with facts.

The scientific results from tracing the brain’s circuitry are in line with how companies like Rolex and Mercedes-Benz actually approach the consumer decision-making model. But most companies still operate under an older assumption. They subscribe to the widely accepted idea that the buyer passes through three stages: cognitive, affective, and behavioral. In other words, we learn, feel, and do.

Granted, two variables sometimes alter the older understanding of cognition, the amount of involvement that a product category creates for consumers and the degree of differentiation that a company achieves. Those variables may cause the learn-feel-do sequence to shift a little, but in the old model, feeling never leads, and learning is most often in first place.

No wonder so much marketing seems to make no impact whatsoever! By the time consumers get around to the learning component of advertising, they’ve long since made a decision one way or the other, based on largely unconscious, sensory-emotive reactions. Those reactions shape everything, including how we relate to companies, how we interpret advertising, and how we respond to both products and services.

A more accurate model, then, is sense-feel-(think)-do.

In the new understanding of cognition, the body and mind aren’t really separate from one another. Instead, scientists now believe, the mind dwells in the body, and reason is shaped by what the senses take in and how the body functions. This intimate interplay means that we’re really “mind-body” people. It also means that advances in science have effectively given us a new kind of consumer.

Companies must take heed of the following lessons from science:

* Human senses are the most effective informationgathering system ever invented. They absorb our experiences or take-away impressions of a company and its offer(s) and, in the process, influence how our minds respond.

* The rationalists are wrong: We’re not machines-we’re animals, linked by traits shared across the species. Our conceptual systems draw on the same common physical realm: the world around us. There is a profound universality to people’s reactions that extends to acting on instincts formed throughout the history of humanity-our collective unconscious is like a template for the entire species. The template will enable astute companies to build marketing platforms that can still be effective and cost-efficient in an era of globalization.

* Access to what is in your customers’ heads requires an understanding of what is happening inside their bodies. The process that people enact in forming their reactions and engaging in purchase behavior isn’t based on rational criteria alone. It mostly happens on a more intuitive, gut level. This process is hard to express, and it’s even harder to quantify feelings that may originate in seemingly vague factors-like the new-car smell that tells you that “new is nice.”

The Ground Truth

To draw an analogy from real life, the U.S. Air Force no longer relies on pilots’ estimation of whether they have hit their intended targets, as they once did. The service realized that a reliance on aerial estimations was leading to sometimes vastly inflated reports of success. Everyone was suddenly Eddie Rickenbacker, the World War I ace. Today, the Air Force has spotters on the ground who can report the truth about whether the objective was realized.

Business needs to employ a similar mechanism. The air-to-ground difference is like the mind-body split. We consciously think we know what’s happening when we make decisions, but our body knows the truth.

Spotters aren’t necessary to gauge the effectiveness of marketing: Tools, such as biofeedback, let us read the body’s reaction to marketing stimuli through objective, real-time measurements.

The value of using such tools is that they enable marketers to see which products and offers break through the clutter. Biofeeclback relies on the body’s natural electricity to gauge arousal and the likability that drives consumer preferences. Besides measuring sweat-gland activity, this tool uses sensors to detect smile or frown muscle activity, and the resulting insights show exactly how consumers feel.

To use an example about the power of biofeedback from my company’s history, my second client was U-Haul, whose CEO felt that the company’s signage didn’t “pop” as well as its competitors’. Our task was to find out whether this was the case for consumers and, then, to verify which of several new signage options would be most effective.

We tried traditional questions and answers to see which sign would win for interest and appeal. This approach didn’t help-it led to three possibilities (including the eventual winner), bunched together as data points on a graph of results. We needed a tool that would more clearly spell out which sign would prevail among consumers.

We used biofeedback-a superior tool for helping gauge the body’s first reaction-to assess the situation more clearly. We wanted to see which sign truly had curbside appeal-after all, that’s what dealer signage is all about. The CEO’s gut instinct turned out to be accurate. The competitor’s signage sat up in the preference zone: high impact and high appeal. U-Haul’s clunky signage was dead on arrival-flat impact and negative appeal.

After biofeedback testing, we returned to the drawing board. The resulting signage proved so strong that in later testing it matched up with the competition head to head. We were able to create an effective new look and feel.

With questions and answers, and a thought process grounded in traditional marketing theory, the signage would likely have either shown the company’s rental trucks or emphasized price. In biofeedback testing, it became clear that the first of those options failed to appeal to consumers on a gut level. The pricing signage tanked as well. The winner: signage showing a visual of a curving, looming open road. This image holds the promise of adventure, and it’s all-American, like Huckleberry Finn lighting out for parts unknown. In retrospect, perhaps it was an obvious choice-except that conventional testing gave it at best a one-in-three shot.

As to the consumer response, dealers reported favorable customer comments and increased sales. One said, “The amazing thing is that, despite being in this location for 12 years, the new sign is bringing in customers who say they never knew we were here.”

The U-Haul story confirms what science has found:

* The signage with the most compelling image, the open road, proved to be dominant, and the reason related to the fact that we think by using our senses to guide us-they take in far more information than we can knowingly process. Human reasoning isn’t only abstract and objective-a sign that provides an intriguing visual attracts us because our reaction process starts with sensory perceptions.

* Based on the results of the questions and answers (based, of course, on a conscious, more rational approach to cognition), the signage with the pricing seemed like a viable option. Biofeedback made it clear that going to cost was a dead end, setting up the chance for consumers to begin worrying about terms and conditions, the contract, and other hassles. It forced a rational response, in exchange for bypassing the possibility of forging an emotional connection. In contrast, the open-road sign transformed U-Haul in consumers’ minds. The company no longer appeared as a cold entity set on earning money while you endured the agony of moving your possessions yourself. Instead, U-Haul emerged as a friend helping you explore the next big adventure in your life. It represented freedom and possibility.

A few of the target audience members, our twenty-something participant\s in the study, could articulate these points. Most couldn’t (or didn’t bother to do so), but by scientifically quantifying their initial gut reactions, the immediate sensory biofeedback readings told the story for them.

1-2-3 Brains in All

Let’s turn now to how our brains work. Again, decision-making is far more instantaneous than we have long imagined. I’m reminded of how our brains actually work whenever I play sports. I’m no superstar, but every now and then in basketball or tennis, I make an incredible shot that I usually can’t make. It happens without much conscious effort; I’m almost just a bystander, realizing only after the fact what I’ve done.

In the marketplace, consumers react instinctively, too. Companies need to realize, accept, and leverage the fact that most of their marketing messages are received on a level of which the target audience isn’t even aware. The U-Haul case is hardly an isolated example. The human body will respond or not respond to sensory clues as it sees fit. More often than not, conscious, rational, attitudinal reactions are overshadowed by emotional responses.

To understand how things work, let’s start with a question: How strong is the mind-body link? Scientists have recently come up with the startling conclusion that without smell-the first of our senses- we wouldn’t have developed a brain at all. Only after a small lump of olfactory tissue atop the nerve cord grew into a brain did the early, reptilian version of humanity literally get off the ground and start to become the species we arc today.

In effect, cognition evolved due to our ability to smell. Sight became dominant only once we were upright, walking, above the ground, on the lookout for our next meal.

The brain didn’t spontaneously appear as the complex organ that it is. It evolved from a much simpler structure. It isn’t enough to know about the lateralism concept of left-vs.-right-brain thinking that earned a Nobel Prize for Roger Sperry in the 1960s. (His now- familiar conclusions distinguished between left-brained people, who are logical and linear, and right-brained people, visually oriented and touchy-feely.) The new scientific understanding holds that the brain is actually made up of different components that interact with each other in fascinating ways.

Over a decade ago, neurologist Paul MacLean concluded that there are actually three brains at work inside us. In simplified terms, these three brains consist of:

* The original brain, smallest in size and dating back to our earliest stages of evolution, is the lizard (reptilian) brain. Its purpose is to maintain basic survival functions, such as respiration, digestion, circulation, and reproduction. Think of it as the janitor in the basement of the brain, taking care of the basics to keep the building running.

* Next in both size and evolution is the leopard (early mammalian) brain, which wraps around the lizard brain. This middle brain adds the capacity for emotion and coordination of movement. This is where we take in the information from our senses. Imagine this brain as the doorman on the building’s ground floor. A role of the middle brain is to let in what it (often unconsciously) deems to be important. Once inside, the stimuli get ushered into the brain’s emotional hot spot. What reaction it gets there colors and even determines the reaction of the brain upstairs, the learning brain.

* Our largest and most recently evolved brain is the learning (late mammalian) brain. The cerebral cortex provides the ability to solve problems, use language and numbers, develop memory, and be creative. This brain is like the CEO on the building’s top floor. This brain makes our rational, cerebral decisions.

Clearly, the old model of rational thought emphasizes the learning brain. The newfound reality is that the leopard brain is crucial. For marketers, this middle brain is important because it helps shape how consumers process marketing stimuli and arrive at purrhnse decisions.

Indeed, the learning brain desperately needs the leopard brain. Think of it its a company president who never comes out of his office to walk the factory floor. The learning brain is completely out of touch on its own, and it has blind spots. It lives in the abstract, in theories, hypothetical situations, and generalizations.

Specific sensory details and perceptual facts are what the brain thrives on. Our language and quantitative and reasoning skills-the domain of the learning brain-came later in evolution and are weaker. As Gerald Zaltman observed in the Journal of Advertising Research, “Verbal language developed only recently in the context of human evolution and written language developed even more recently. Thus, the human brain did not evolve to favor verbal functions.”

Moreover, not only is our brain relatively new at language skills and rational thought, today these skills are receding as we become more and more reliant on multimedia stimulation.

For marketers, this understanding of cognition explains why certain brands attract lifelong devotees. Harley-Davidson’s loyal bikers blow past the fact that there are better, less expensive motorcycles for sale because the tribal culture of riding a hog stimulates their senses and captures their hearts.

Marketing to the Senses: Some Guidelines

Keep it simple. Create clues that are easily followed. Sensory clues that are more readily grasped are more fun and make us feel better. For instance, we see a bottle of Heinz ketchup, and it becomes both literally and figuratively comfort food. In an ever more fragmented world, it provides, on a functional level, simple information processing. At the same time, emotionally it constructs an internal signpost that takes us back to childhood. At ease, we don’t feel a need to question or analyze-we already trust. Without needing to scrutinize it, we register the bottle’s simple, classic label and race past any price-point comparison to lock in the emotional connection we feel.

In contrast, clues that are physically obscure or blurry create the equivalent emotional reaction. Marketing that creates confusion in consumers is scary, uncomfortable, and-quite simply-dumb. As a species, we want to enter a situation and get a sense of the vista. A certain degree of intrigue or suspense is fine, but when there’s too much subtlety and too high a degree of difficulty, our ability to form a judgment is hindered.

Relevancy drives connection. Whether we know it or not, we as consumers often walk around with it “For Sale” sign around our necks. We want to be lured. We’re always looking for greater fulfillment, and a company’s offer might be just the ticket. Emotions turn on because we process a sensory clue and the offer that it illustrates is meaningful to us.

Sparked by the chance of finding relevancy, our emotions intuitively gather more information than reason alone can provide. Rationally, the higher the cost of the product, the greater the need for utility, but on an emotional basis, relevancy often outstrips literal value and drives a different decision that feels right.

Always sell hope. As consumers, we long for what will lift daily existence into another, higher, more enriched sphere. Such hope could be derided as fantasy or even merely as selfishness and self- indulgence, but to do so would be wrong. As evolutionary psychology reminds us, humans are driven to feel good about ourselves. Self- confidence is often inflated, but it’s an evolutionary advantage to feel good because it instills in people a degree of vitality that in turn attracts allies and friends.

There are, however, two important corollaries to this rule. The first is that although a company must always sell hope, it may do so by peddling fear-thereby reminding us of what we hope to avoid. The second corollary is that whereas a company must always sell hope, it must deliver on faithful security.

The truth is that nothing deceives more cruelly than false hope. The payback? Consumers will mercilessly punish a company if its marketing efforts make a promise on which the company underdelivers.

Believability sticks. Trust is a critical element in business, but it’s also incredibly fragile. It’s difficult to gain and easy to lose. With trust, there is no slow demise-it crashes. As the case with Firestone’s defective SUV tires proved, when a company loses consumer trust, a death spiral commences that no rational, utilitarian, product-oriented marketing campaign can hope to stop.

The reason that trust is so elusive is grounded in the fact that the whole company-consumer relationship lies beyond reason-it’s deeper and more emotionally based. Why is trust so important to a company? Because if a company can embed its touchpoints with sensory clues that signal (but don’t exaggeratedly scream) empathy, the company can come out ahead. Trust is important to consumers because we want to believe, want to belong, and want to feel intimately attached to what we perceive as an ally.

Make it memorable. Consumers are not abstract thinkers, so a company must root its pitch in the five senses. Have a focal point, and be easy to perceive. To survive the initial sensory screening- without which no memory is possible-a company is wise to adhere to the hierarchy of sensory intake whereby visual imagery and then the other four senses are likely to predominate over interest in the written word. In that way, a greater, deeper involvement with consumers becomes possible.

Keep it close to home. There are few (if any) commercial rewards for trying to broaden the target audience’s collective comfort zone beyond what is already known and familiar. The better route for a company is to entrench its offer in something that is already recognizable to that audience. Deep down, go with the known sensory clues and the fundamental patterns of life that evolutionary psychology helps illuminate. Then, closer to the surface, add in the local, customized accent p\oints that function like spices for a meal.

The truth is that the range of what is acceptable to people is small. As consumers, we’re most likely to relate to what we know best. We draw us/them dichotomies all the time, for better or worse. For marketers, it’s essential to appeal to consumers’ sense of what’s familiar. To gain our buy-in, never sell us something new or strange until and unless it’s first been wrapped in the familiar.

Focus on faces. Charles Darwin himself studied faces across cultures and wrote about the universality of human emotion. Part of the explanation for why faces arc so powerful to humans is without doubt pure aesthetics. A pretty or handsome face is enjoyable to observe. But there are other reasons why the face engages us so much as a species, and why marketing should in turn include the use of faces whenever feasible.

Don’t lead with price. There are three steps in the consumer decision-making process: sensory impressions, emotional assessment, and a rational confirmation. Where does price fit into the picture? As a sensory clue, a posted price in a store or print ad is an impersonal abstraction. When marketing leads with price, this indirect contact has a negative effect on how deeply the emotional assessment engages us as consumers.

Price is not in any psychological list of basic human needs. Worth is, but that’s a translation that gains its power and relevance once we’ve actually experienced the offer. Not surprisingly, then, price lacks cither sensory or emotive linkage. It’s not that price-based marketing doesn’t feel right. It just doesn’t resonate at all. (Remember U-Haul?) What leading with price does is to tell consumers to look around and compare because price is important. It turns the sale into a commodity or simply a transaction.

To encourage consumers to make the purchase on a cognitive, learning-brain level means losing the opportunity for the initial emotional connection. You can take consumers from the emotive to the cognitive, but you can’t fully take them from cognitive to emotive. What’s lost is the chance to drive past price to a more lucrative impulse purchase and the potential to forge a lasting bond with consumers that will bring them back for more.

The rationalists are wrong: We’re not machines-we’re animals.

Measuring the Irrational Consumer

It’s said that Walt Disney, touring his theme park, at least once dropped to his knees to learn what a 6-year-old would see. It’s hard to imagine many CEOs following his lead, no matter what the importance of understanding how consumers perceive their company and its products.

Disney was brilliant and went with his instincts. For the rest of us, the trick is to find a reliable research tool that can measure customer perceptions in an effective, unbiased manner. Traditional methods of measurement are inadequate: They collate attitudes rather than feelings, or engage customers in cerebral exercises, or produce results open to any interpretation at all. Methods based on verbal language address only a small portion of communication.

More than anything, traditional methods are too slow-they wait for the customer to rationalize a decision that he’s already unconsciously made. Our real, emotion-driven decision-making process happens in a matter of split seconds-some 3,000 times faster than our rational response. Marketers need to look at unconscious, nonverbal, automatic reactions: Nothing is more basic than the human body, including how it reflects our initial sensory-emotive reaction to marketing efforts and shapes our purchase behavior to follow.

As it happens, the best measurement tool-far less prone to off- target analysis than simple observation or studying body language- is one that has been in use for decades: biofeedback. A blend of psychology, biology, and electronics, biofeedback is most commonly used as a stress-relief treatment method in which a psychologist monitors a patient’s biorhythms to help change his functional behavior.

When applied to business, biofeedback is perhaps more appropriately thought of as biosensing, because it’s being used not to change but to measure sensory responses. Using tiny sensors to “hear” our nerve cells communicating, the tool allows researchers to access-in real time-consumers’true sensory reactions before those reactions are translated and reorganized by the rational, learning brain. Companies can assess initial reactions to a host of stimuli- for instance, in what we call stationary testing, my company uses biofeedback to test participants’ reactions to TV spots, print ads, direct mail, circulars, and other promotional items. For real-life settings, we have mobile biofeedback units.

It’s all about tapping into the unconscious, in real time. Monitoring customers in real time is worlds away from traditional, sit-down focus-group interview sessions, and the results may not be what you’re used to hearing, or what you want to hear. But biosensing is as close as we’ve yet come to actually getting inside the consumer’s mind-and that’s where you need to be.

-D.H.

U-Haul emerged as a friend helping you explore the next big adventure in your life.

The Hearing-Thinking Gap

By Gerald Zaltman

When consumers are exposed to product concepts, company stories, or brand information, they don’t passively absorb those messages. Instead, they create their own meaning by mixing information from the company with their own memories, other stimuli present at the moment, and the metaphors that come to mind as they think about the firm’s message.

For example, consumers can accurately repeat messages from healthcare authorities about the recommended frequency for oralcare checkups and the reasons why they should visit a dental hygienist every six months. Dentists and other healthcare professionals tell this story repeatedly. Yet although many consumers can replay this story when asked, they actually experience another, quite different story. This other story includes significant skepticism about the true need to visit a dentist every six months.

A dental-referral service obtained this insight and the consumer thinking behind it only after carefully analyzing the metaphors that consumers used to describe their dental-office visits. For example, one consumer used a picture from a child’s fairy-tale book, specifically Little Red Riding Hood, to describe his feelings that healthcare professionals fabricated this advice. As this visual metaphor was explored further and the interviewer probed beyond the initial charge that the advice is made up, the person described dental professionals as the deceptive wolf. This revealed his judgment that they are motivated only by self-interest.

The lesson: The messages that consumers take away from a communication may be very different from the ones that a company intended to convey. Moreover, simply asking people what story they heard or believe is behind a marketing message does not reveal what story they have actually created for themselves.

GERALD ZALTMAN is a professor of marketing at Harvard Business School. From How Customers Think: Essential Insights Into the Mind of the Market (Harvard Business School). (C)2003

Never sell us something new or strange until it’s been wrapped in the familiar.

DAN HILL is president of St. Paul, Minn.-based Sensory Logic Inc., a science-based identity-management consultancy. Adapted from Body of Truth: Leveraging What Customers Can’t or Won’t Say (Wiley). (C)2003

Copyright Conference Board, Inc. Nov/Dec 2003