We're Only Human, Baby

Marketers around the globe spend hundreds of billions of dollars a year on advertising. Yet fewer than half of their campaigns succeed. That's a lot of money wasted. One of the reasons many advertisers fail is they forget their target markets are humans! Our human traits, features, and emotions factor into whether advertising has an impact on us.

It's pretty simple: successful marketing appeals to the way our genes and brains work. I got interested in brain function when a neurosurgeon performed lower back surgery on me for two herniated discs. Why was a neurosurgeon working on my lower back, a good 2 feet from my brain? This was the first question of many which lead me to finally understand how things get into the brain, and what makes us tick. It struck me how important it is for advertisers to understand more about how people process ads and make brand choices - specifically, using their emotions, attitudes, values, and memories.

These criteria are what I call the "gimmes" - the self-centered demands we all have for emotional fulfillment of our different moods. As much as selfishness is viewed as a negative personality trait, it is innate and genetic. This isn't what our parents would have had us believe when they said, "Gimme, gimme, never gets ...", but it's the truth. Wanting things is genetically natural; humans are wired to be self-centered to ensure survival. So above all, marketing efforts should offer emotional pay-offs that satiate consumers' moods, desires, insecurities, and their status in the world. To be more effective, marketers should focus on consumers' "gimmes," and less on brand features.

For example, a company wants to advertise a power hand-drill. One strategy would be to discuss its features - its suitability for many jobs, a long battery life, a laser-guided beam of light, or a low price point. The problem is that consumers aren't looking for a drill, per se. They are looking to put holes and screws into things. And the choice of brands will be influenced by more...

Consumers who buy drills want emotional pay-offs. They want to avoid the disappointment of ruining a surface by inexpert drilling. They want to experience pride and feel competent. They want their spouse to exclaim with delight (proving their worth). They want to show off their accomplishment to the neighbors. Most consumers want to experience many of these pay-offs. And since many drills put holes in things equally well, a successful brand will go beyond advertising its features to assuring emotional pay-offs. We see in our Ipsos databases that brands that do this tend to achieve greater brand commitment and brand equity, and command higher prices and profitability.

We often see mature, established brands struggle to maintain their success. When I realized how our brain works to tune out familiar stimuli - in order to be ready for any new danger or new input - the challenges faced by established brands became clearer, as did possible solutions. This also helped to explain why frequent advertising exposures encounter diminishing returns in their impact on consumers. Marketers need to keep evolving and changing the consumer experience to avoid desensitization.

Advertisers really have two main jobs, and they need to know which is most required for their brand: (1) get the right brand associations into consumers' minds then (2) trigger, or activate, these at the right time. An example of excellent triggering is the old "It's Miller Time" campaign, which leveraged the concept that after a hard day's work, it was time to relax and enjoy a Miller beer. The campaign summoned up the transition from work to relaxation, a beer consumption time. The campaign worked to trigger the brand at the transition period from work to relaxation, and associated the brand with the emotional pay-offs (for the human "gimmes"). "It's Miller Time" is a beautiful, easy-to-remember slogan that activates positive feelings of quitting time, triggers the beer consumption period, and ties in the brand name - all in one easy-to-remember memory unit. This is not about product features, how the beer is made, purity, or taste. These elements are already known to consumers. "Miller Time" triggers the brand and pay-offs at the relevant time association. Brilliant!

Below are some implications for brand managers suggested by my research at Ipsos, and found in my new book, Gimme! The Human Nature of Successful Marketing:

• Be fresh and original. For something to stand out and register in our long-term memories, it needs to be somewhat irregular. The Aflac duck is one example of a brand that has done a great job of leveraging uniqueness and irregularity to engage the brain.
• Simple is good. Our brains are bombarded with stimuli. As supported by our Ipsos data-bases, advertising messages served up in units, slogans, and stories win out over fragmented if attractive alternatives. Simple, emotional enriched memory units get into long-term memory better.
• Enhance the brand with marketing properties. Brands that use devices like icons, mnemonics, spokespeople, cartoon characters, and other extra properties often get great results. Consider Tiger Woods for Nike, The white squawking duck for AFLAC, the white Michelin character, and the little Tetley Tea folks (elves). Each has added a personality and something more to evaluate than the basic functionality of the product.
• Enhance the brand with the human senses. Another way to enhance brands is to enrich them in the five human senses. For example: Johnson & Johnson's Baby Powder offers a unique distinctive smell; Perrier water comes in a distinctive green pear-shaped bottle; And Pepto-Bismol is a shocking pink. In these examples, the brand is creating and leveraging elements beyond what is necessary for product performance. These extra senses offer more for consumers to latch on to, and allow the brand to be stored in more parts of the brain, in the different centers for touch, taste, vision, sound, and so on.

When you get a better understanding of the brain's wiring, the role of emotions, how the senses work, how memories are created, and how we make decisions, it's easier to grasp what marketing must do to resonate in the consumer's mind.