I am not going to talk about the NA any more! But still, this is pretty cool from a big fash brand - I presume if they’re making animated GIFs it’s Tumblr-specific marketing.

Not exactly the imagery I’d expect from Givenchy, who have lately been exploring a gothic couture direction. This is a glitchy techno gothic - with the boots, a fraction Balenciaga. Can’t quite map it against their autumn 2012 collection. But let’s see.

(via parisnightsfashionlights)

Consumers are uninformed, and consequently paranoid, about data collection and privacy standards. They presume marketers are peering into their personal lives and equate web analysts to identity thieves. What they fail to understand are the hidden costs to cracking down on privacy, for the capitalist and consumer in us all. Privacy restrictions will result in decreased sales, lost jobs, poor content, irrelevant advertising and shitty consumer experiences. It will set digital technology back a decade. One could argue this pro-privacy is almost rooted in anti-capitalism.

As marketers and advertisers, we only stand to lose. Advancements in neuromarketing and analytics are making great strides to give those very same consumers truly personalized digital experience across all mediums. We envision experiences that put their needs before those of brands and actually improve lives.

If there was ever a time to fight ignorance, it’s now. Join us for a heated debate over this brewing topic

What a vile SXSWi panel….

The “OMG reds under the bed!!!!” comment can stand for itself. Neuromarketing has also never (AFAIK) produced any results of any robustness or significance, but we’ll also let that stand for the moment.

My particular objection is that this panel destroys itself by its own logic:

• 1. It’s logically inconsistent
  he appeal to allow marketers to track everything is putatively to get “experiences” that “put [consumers’] needs above those of brands”. But the complaint is exactly that consumers are putting their feelings of concern above thinking of the poor ickle advertisers & sacrificing their privacy For The Sake Of Capitalism.
• 2. It’s bad marketing
  Proposing the consumer as “ignorant” and proposing to “fight” them, what bellicose nonsense! Assuming that your customers are idiots who need to be “educated” (-slash-brainwashed) gets you nowhere, as you’re refusing to understand why they’re resisting. If you don’t understand your customer’s needs, you’ve little likelihood of being able to sell them something they want.

Pew Study Finds News Sites Fail to Aim Ads at Users
Tazina Vega, New York Times, 13 Feb 2012.

A new study released Monday by the Pew Research Center Project for Excellence in Journalism looked at 22 news Web sites and more than 5,300 digital ads. It found that many of the sites had not attracted the same advertisers online as they did on other platforms.

In part, these sites were failing to attract online ads because they were not using technology that would customize ads based on their users’ online behavior.

[…] Of the news sites surveyed, those that used the most user-focused technology were Yahoo, The New York Times and CNN. The rest of the sites, which included Fox News, The Washington Post, The Economist, Time, The Los Angeles Times, ABC News and The Atlantic, used very low levels of the technology.

“Not currently” is only a mild and no doubt temporary reprieve - but nonetheless worthy of some note. The society of control is unevenly distributed.

It seems to be a fair portion of what I blog about these days.

Not that I am a marketer by profession (I’m a researcher), and certainly not that I like marketing or what it tries to do.

I am, however, interested in how it works - or otherwise. I am interested in how marketing concepts seep outward into wider ways in which contemporary people/society view themselves, and I am interested in how ideas from wider thinking get taken up (and usually bastardised) by marketers.

Critical thinking about marketing. There’s clearly a book in that.

Ugh.

1. A Guide to the Digital Advertising Industry That’s Watching Your Every Click
Joseph Turow, The Atlantic, 7 Feb 2012
An excerpt from his new book, The Daily You.

2. How Companies Learn Your Secrets
Charles Duhigg, New York Times, 16 Feb 2012
The Target / pregnant teenager case-study you’ve already read.

3. Predictive Analytics and Information Camouflage
Rob Horning, the New Inquiry, 17 Feb 2012.

Says Horning:

As with political scandal, what’s so bothersome about this less the targeting itself — though that is bad for reasons Turow details, more on that below — but the cover-up. Retailers don’t want transparency in their attempts to manipulate your behavior; they want to control how your habits evolve. They understand that the more you know about their techniques, the less effective they will be. And they try to justify themselves with the idea that they know better than us what we really want and their marketing techniques allow us to get out of our way to indulge ourselves how we really want and become who we really want to be.
Thus Duhigg concludes with this quote from Target’s targeting guru: “Just wait. We’ll be sending you coupons for things you want before you even know you want them.” We’re supposed to think that is a good thing. We’re not supposed to think that the company is using the data it has collected on us to shape the possibilities of what we can become, to control the context in which we make our lives and understand ourselves.

This is the crux of the objection: now advertising might really be successful at controlling us.

It implies, perhaps, a belief that advertising is not yet doing so. This is a view not universally shared: for example, in Baudrillard’s conception of the consumer.

In The Consumer Society, Baudrillard writes of the consumer as not fully formed, without predetermined desires guiding their consumption choices (as per the classic economic model) – need is instead “the product of the system of production” (1998:74). [Whether companies/brands can be said to have more agency in generating needs than consumers, however, is as far as I recall unclear. Need is generated by the system, not by specific producers per se.]

The consumer cannot even choose to choose: consumption is institutionally enforced behaviour. There is an ideology of freedom, but this simply serves to conceal how consumption acts as social control in the industrial system (1998: 80-1,84).

Although “there is no-one there – no person” (1998: 88), self-actualisation is nonetheless possible, even the goal of the consumer: in the absence of the self as an absolute whole, we must re-form ourselves within the system of differences, creating anonymous ‘synthetic individuality’. The consumer seeks out personalised goods in search of that “difference which will make us ourselves.” (1998: 87) The sign-value of each object bought will refer to a whole set of related signs, so consumers effectively buy into ready made lifestyles in the search for identity (Don Slater, Consumer Culture and Modernity 1997: 191). In some ways this is not really self-actualisation, as the consumer has no agency to make significant decisions – they are wholly controlled by the code which they do not create. No resistance is possible.

Baudrillard would, no doubt, be amused by these developments in digital advertising - he is a theorist who does not offer much hope, just a wry shrug and an “I told you so.” From reading Baudrillard, we are offered no solution.

Is one needed? How radical and how alarming, actually, are these developments in digital advertising?

From Duhigg’s article we learn that Target can potentially know a hell of a lot about us. However, it leverages this by… sending people discount coupons.

What’s more, because of the data attached to her Guest ID number, Target knows how to trigger Jenny’s habits. They know that if she receives a coupon via e-mail, it will most likely cue her to buy online. They know that if she receives an ad in the mail on Friday, she frequently uses it on a weekend trip to the store. And they know that if they reward her with a printed receipt that entitles her to a free cup of Starbucks coffee, she’ll use it when she comes back again.

This is a little underwhelming - first, what percentage of discount coupons get used? Given the relatively high friction of bringing them with you / actually completing a purchase online, I imagine the answer’s not high - perhaps 10%. This skews people’s shopping baskets slightly, but it’s not total control.

What would be more concerning was if the recommendations start to make the purchase for you - e.g. they pre-fill your grocery basket when you come to online shop, so you have to actively remove them. Tesco actually offer a ‘predictive shop’ option as a perk to encourage you to start shopping online - “Enter your Clubcard number when you register to see what you regularly buy in store” as a “fantastic reason to shop with us”. Building in Clubcard promotions to this wouldn’t be hard. There is however the risk that any consumer backlash - any dis-ease - immediately and visibily hits the bottom line, in the form of more ‘abandoned carts’ as people see the prediction, freak out, and log off. Given this, there may be some wariness to introduce.

Another chance for liberty (after a sort) is suggested by Horning’s comment: “They understand that the more you know about their techniques, the less effective they will be.” According to a discussion on Quora, 2% of Firefox viewers - but perhaps 14% of active website visits - are made by people with Ad Blocker installed in their browser - making targeted online advertising a moot point.

From Quora [anonymouse]:

There’s been a lot of disparaging remarks regarding ad blocking software here on Quora. In your own echo chambers, you can tell each other that ad blocking software is insignificant, wrong, anti-social, non-viral, immoral, geeky and no one really uses it because it threatens your business. Keep thinking that way. Like the local defunct hardware stores, your day will come and you’ll never understand why

Coupons, online advertising… Digital marketing may be gaining a lot more knowledge about the consumer, but I’m skeptical as to whether this is actually a step-change in how effective it is in driving action.

This may be because there’s still space left for free choice and action… Or it may because systemically (a la Baudrillard) we have no means left of relating to the world except through the consumption of signs. Depending on the weather, my view changes.

Work experience programme must be voluntary, says major employer amid complaints it is profiting from forced labour.

Supermarket group Tesco said it has asked DWP officials to make the work experience scheme voluntary after thousands of angry customers wrote in and posted messages on Twitter and the company’s Facebook site accusing the multinational of profiting from hundreds of thousands of hours of forced unpaid work.

On the one hand, a victory. People power.

On the other hand, not.

People power proving powerless when it’s enacted through democratic political means - the Tory party denying there’s any opposion; the Lib Dems apparently silent, and Labour nowhere to be found. Even the very idea of writing to your MP about this or turning up in a constintuency surgery asking him/her to ask a question in the Commons seems ludicrous, seems tilting at windmills - who believes that works? (Did it ever?)

But when - as consumers, not as citizens - we put the pressure - on companies and brands, not on our elected representatives - then something happens.

This blurring of citizenship and consumption is neoliberalism in action. In its public-facing ideology at least, the interests of business and state are thought to be mutually supportive - with a resultant blurring as to which of these really holds power. Baudrillard - once a Marxist, then a nihilist - becomes our guide to this modern terrain. In The Consumer Society (1998) he quotes President Eisenhower saying that government best secures economic growth by encouraging the individual to spend, and that taxation is a less profitable way of connecting an individual’s money and their desired services than consumption could be – consumption as a “social levy”, and also “civic duty” keeping the economy going (1998:82-3).

Furthermore, society and civic responsibility become just another pair of values to be consumed - hollowed out as empty signifiers fit only for endless exchange (not use). In Simulacra And Simulation, Baudrillard claims:

Advertising, “fundamentally saying and repeating incessantly, ‘I buy, I consume, I take pleasure’, today repeats in other forms, ‘I vote, I participate, I am present, I am concerned’ – mirror of a paradoxical mockery, mirror of the indifference of all public signification.” (1994:91)

Seems apt.

A clear and convincing take-down of the notion that (a) influencers exist, and (b) marketing at them is worth doing.

To summarise the key points:

1. Six degrees of separation does in fact exist - but it doesn’t work the way most people think it does. When we imagine these chains we assume they must work through celebrities, leaders, & other social connectors - whereas in fact messages travel horizontally, not hierarchically.

The overall message here is that real social networks are connected in more complex and more egalitarian ways than Jacobs or even Milgram imagined— a result that has now been confirmed with many experiments, empirical studies, and theoretical models. In spite of all this evidence, however, when we think about how social networks work, we continue to be drawn to the idea that certain “special people,” whether famous wives of presidents or gregarious local businessmen, are disproportionately responsible for connecting the rest of us. Evidence, in fact, seems to have very little to do with why we think this way

2. In The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell talked about “social epidemics” set off by a small number of “superspreaders” - what he calls “the law of the few”. This is obviously catnip for marketers - it makes manipulating a large audience seem straightforward - and is the model behind influencer marketing. Unfortunately it’s not true.

3. Influence may be subtle - e.g. from observing behaviour rather than explicit verbal recommendations. It may also happen in ways we don’t acknowledge because they don’t fit our model of how things “should” work - e.g. employees influencing their boss.
[NB This isn’t necessarily problematic for influencer marketing: it’s likely to be fine if it “works” by people copying the influencer’s actions rather than doing what they say/blog about.]

4. There are different types of influence - friends are influential in different ways to Oprah. People may also be influential only on their very specific topics of expertise.
[NB Again not necessarily a problem for influencer marketing.]

5. Measuring influence is very difficult, so usually we’re not measuring it directly at all:

For example, to demonstrate just one incident of infl uence between two friends, Anna and Bill, you need to demonstrate that whenever Anna adopts a certain idea or product, Bill is more likely to adopt the same idea or product as well. Even keeping track of just one such relationship would not be easy. And as researchers quickly discovered, doing it for many people simultaneously is prohibitively difficult. In place of observing infl uence directly, therefore, researchers have proposed numerous proxies for infl uence, such as how many friends an individual has, or how many opinions they voice, or how expert or passionate they are about a topic, or how highly they score on some personality test— things that are easier to measure than infl uence itself. Unfortunately, while all these measures are plausible substitutes for infl uence, they all derive from assumptions about how people are infl uenced, and no one has ever tested these assumptions. In practice, therefore, nobody really knows who is an influencer and who isn’t.

6. How much more influential is an influencer than a regular person? Let’s say fully 3x more. That doesn’t get you very far in reaching millions of people.

7. Doing so requires adding a second idea from network theory, that of social contagion. The hope is that this will multiply the “law of the few” so that the influencer’s choices reach millions of people. The problem is that networks don’t work like that.

8. Duncan Watts and Peter Dodds tested this using computer simulations, they found that the initial “influencer effect” didn’t hold across the whole network. An individual with 3x influence didn’t result in three times more people overall being influenced - in fact, often their impact was negligible.

The reason is simply that when influence is spread via some contagious process, the outcome depends far more on the overall structure of the network than on the properties of the individuals who trigger it. Just as forest fires require a conspiracy of wind, temperature, low humidity, and combustible fuel to rage out of control over large tracts of land, social epidemics require just the right conditions to be satisfied by the network of influence. And as it turned out, the most important condition had nothing to do with a few highly influential individuals at all. Rather, it depended on the existence of a critical mass of easily influenced people who influence other easy- to- influence people

9. Yeah yeah, but that’s a computer simulation. So Watts,Jake Hofman, Winter Mason and Eytan Baksh tested this on Twitter data, looking at link-sharing:

The nice thing about these shortened URLs is that they effectively assign a unique code to every piece of content broadcast on Twitter. Thus when a user wishes to “retweet” something, it’s possible to see whom it came from originally, and thereby trace chains of diffusion across the follower graph.
In total, we tracked more than 74 million of these diffusion chains initiated by more than 1.6 million users, over a two- month interval in late 2009. For each event, we counted how many times the URL in question was retweeted— fi rst by the original “seed” user’s immediate followers, then by their followers, and their followers’ followers, and so on— thereby tracing out the full “cascade” of retweets triggered by each original tweet.
As the figure on page 102 shows, some of these cascades were broad and shallow, while others were narrow and deep. Others still were very large, with complex structure, starting out small and trickling along before gaining momentum somewhere else in the network. Most of all, however, we found that the vast majority of attempted cascades— roughly 98 percent of the total— didn’t actually spread at all

10. Comparing half the dataset against the other - as a proxy for a past/future predictive split - they found that individual-level predictions (as a marketer would do, in identifying influencers to target) were very noisy. ” Even though it was the case that on average, individuals with many followers who had been successful at triggering cascades of retweets in the past were more likely to be successful in the future, individual cases fluctuated wildly at random”

Conclusion: The most effective way to influence a network is through a lot of ordinary-level people, not an elite of “special influencers”.

Marketing insight: You *might* do that with freebies and promotions, but it’s pretty expensive to give even something small to a mass group (e.g. 5% of customer base). What you actually have to do is:
(a) Not Be A Shit - because if you fall down on the hygiene factors they’re not going to recommend your brand; then
(b) Deliver gold-standard customer service. Making a problem into not-a-problem quickly and painlessly can delight people, and that’s how you create advocates.

Ah the challenges of having an original idea! In the process of transferring my longer-form posts here to my new domain JayOh.net, I find that the themes in my last post Influencer marketing: two speculative stories were prefigured by Tom Ewing over a year ago:

There are “influencers” who live in the world of “social media”, and if you influence these “influencers” they will say nice stuff about you and your brand will do better.

The reason they are “influencers” is that people who aren’t influencers - let’s call them, oh, “nobodies”, that’s catchy - anyway these nobodies listen to the influencers and spend money on stuff they mention.

So what you need to do is find a way of measuring who’s an influencer and who’s a nobody, and then be really nice to the influencers and give them free stuff - no strings attached of course, since otherwise you would go against BLOGGING ETHICS.

Of course in order to become influencers you need to have lots of nobodies who will listen to you. Some of them will be your friends, so what the brands are doing is giving you free stuff and specifically not giving it to your friends, in the hope that you’ll show it off to them.

This isn’t a brilliant concept of friendship TBH. It’s pretty much the way street teams operate but they’re aimed at 14 year old boys. The lack of reciprocity here also isn’t a problem if you’re a Social Media Rock Star and all your real life friends are Social Media Rock Stars too because they’ll also be getting the free stuff.

So, OK, what if you’re a nobody? (I am a nobody, by the way - I used to be an “influencer” but I guess I haven’t been tweeting enough lately.) DON’T WORRY though, you can easily become an influencer too. Then as your influence increases you will have nobodies of your own to influence and you will get free stuff too.

How do you get influence? Spend more time on social media building your “relationships”. A good start might be retweeting the influencers you know, so they notice you.

If you think this sounds like a massive Ponzi Scheme, you’d be COMPLETELY RIGHT.

Influencing the Influencer on tomewing.tumblr.com

01. The attraction of influencer marketing is in being able to leverage word-of-mouth and peer recommendations.

02. This is valuable because peer influence is the most effective form of influencing what we buy, or what we feel about a brand. [source]

03. Peer influence has this impact because it’s advice from people we trust. Key to almost every definition of an influencer is their credibility and realness:

“Broadly I define an ‘influencer’ as someone who follows their own path, is rooted in creativity, and is looking for new ways to change or redefine their world. Someone who is an ‘influencer’ not only has broad relationships but also has deep relationships. In short, they are building a community around shared beliefs, principles, and interest.”
Philip McKenzie, Managing Partner at FREE DMC and Founder of Influencer Conference: [source]

04. We trust our friends and family because we have known them a long time and feel emotionally close to them.

05. This means we believe that their recommendations will have our best interests at heart.

*

But what happens when brands come in and try to get a piece of the action?

1a. MediaCorp have identified Amelia as influential about Personal Personality Monitoring Devices (PPMDs). They send her their new product, SomaTech, in the hope that she will talk about it to her sphere of influence and generate increased purchases.

2a. As a personal branding expert, Amelia is savvy to influencer marketing. She knows she needs to deliver visibility if she’s to continue receiving shiny freebies, so she schedules a series of tweets about the product for the next week. Each is very proper, including the brandname, the hashtag the PR had sent, and exhorting retweets from her followerbase with one too many exclamation marks.

3a. Amelia has 4,000 followers on Twitter, but two-thirds are bots or other personal branding gurus (or both), and the rest she purchased at $2.50 - $4 per follower. [source]. Almost everything she tweets is automated from Oprah Winfrey’s Paper.li, but she does also auto-schedule interactions with her sockpuppet accounts to keep her Engagement score up. This helps keep the free shiny things flowing from the social media PRs

4a. Amelia’s tweets about the SomaTech are retweeted a respectable 30 times each, and along with Amelia’s 15 positive mentions of the product herself, MediaCorp are happy.

5a. However MediaCorp haven’t connected up their Twitter analytics with their store’s Google analytics or purchase data. If they did, they’d see Amelia only generated 20 clickthroughs and no purchases. This is because her highly automated copy-cat content is followed by almost no real, active human beings. (One of the bots did try to buy something but the transaction was declined as their card was registered in Zurich and their shipping address, Belarus.)

6a. Next week Amelia shoots a YouTube segment for MediaCorp’s competitor’s personality monitor, SimSoothe, who sent her not just a free device but $250 as well. The video gets trolled by 4-Chan and goes viral.

The kind of social media user who’s highly receptive to sharing brand promotions may not be generating content that real people value. Influence metrics are highly gameable and, if incentivised by freebies, attract game-players - not the “real people” marketers actually want.

*

1b. So MediaCorp improve their influencers algorithm and have another go:

2b. Bill’s a normal guy, albeit the linchpin of his group of friends. He’s a bit surprised to receive the free SomaTech device as he’d tumbld just the other day about PPMDs being a bit creepy. This had got a bunch of reblogs and sparked a bit of a debate.

3b. Bill’s not sure what to do with the SomaTech, but his mum raised him proper so he knows that if he receives a gift, he’s got to say thanks. So he writes a blog post as MediaCorp requested, which is auto-shared to his other social networks.

4b. Bill’s ex-boyfriend sees his post. He knows MediaCorp have been exploting child labour in the Philippines, and sees an opportunity to embarass Bill. “Since when were you such a slut that you did everything some big company told you to? I remember that time we were talking about….” An argument breaks out among their friends.

5b. “Mate, seriously? That time you suggested I should get those Blahphonic headphones? Was that you, or, you know, something you’d been told to say?” asks Cate. Bill feels really awkward - it’s the fifth time he’s been asked that question this week.

6b. Bill disables his Facebook account, Tumblr etc - making him an early adopter of the Going Analogue trend, and influencing three friends to follow. But as he no longer has a social media presence, his departure goes tragically un-curated.

If customers know that peer recommendations have been purchased by brands, many will stop trusting these friends’ recommendations. This is pretty corrosive to the friendship - and defeats the brand marketer’s purpose too..

*

So what if publicly disclosed “I did this because Brand X paid me” is individually toxic to personal credibility - but sneaky (non-disclosed) influencer marketing is socially toxic to friends’ trust?

Perhaps the only circumstances in which it works is celebrity influencer marketing - but only where there is no relationship of trust between celeb and fans. To participate in influencer marketing is to say, “I see my friendships as social capital, and I’ll exchange them for a fee”. Works fine for celebs who’re selling themselves (*kough, Kardashians*) but among almost every other social media user? Rather more double-edged.

Ping me baby*: Digital pathology and the London riots by Nadim Samma.

This is brilliant. I am finding my political position difficult at the moment - I should have written this.

Really great how-to about indie marketing an iPhone game, with the added bonus that Hogrocket are trialling all these principles live with their new game Tiny Invaders.

Fab example of new transparent social business in action.

[benjamesward] Indie Marketing: How to tell the world about your game (part 2):

Some small developers confuse the act of “self-releasing” with the discipline of “self-publishing”. Anybody can release a game now… just click through a few dialog boxes and BOOM - your title is on the App Store. However, actually supporting and promoting your product, growing the business, and achieving greater overall success is something that requires way more than a few clicks of a mouse.

At Hogrocket we like to think that we’re taking the publishing side of our studio seriously. We have connections with platform holders, worldwide press, conference organisers, traditional publishers, QA services, freelancers of various disciplines, and most of the other kind of people we need to in order to achieve our publishing aims. We’ve planned the promotion of our games over time, and we have a budget put aside to support this. We have pricing strategies defined, and all of the analytics we need to get a clear idea of what’s actually happening in our market. Of course we’re small enough to turn on a dime and throw all of this planning out the window if the analytics differ from our predictions.

So let’s talk tangibles. What is Hogrocket’s strategy? […]

Comment by thrawnpop on Guardian article, Is this the start of the second dotcom bubble? by Dominic Rushe, 20 Feb 2011.

This.

Everyone’s like, OMG, Facebook means we know so much more about our consumers - that’s got to be worth sofuckingmuch.

They seem to be forgetting that “consumers” - aka people - don’t have limitless money to suddenly start buying loads more stuff. Better targeting may make more people buy the socially-marketed product, but only at the expense of not buying stuff they currently purchase.

It’s essentially zero sum.

In the UK and America, salaries are flat and inflation is over 5%. In real terms people are getting a bit poorer every year. What’s different is that this time, we know it - after a decade’s economic growth funded by consumer borrowing (funded by debt, not wealth), individuals - and lenders - have cottoned on that that gravy train has halted. With little in the way of savings and nervous in mood, now we spend what we earn. Which is decreasing.

Facebook marketing could be magic mind control juice, but all consumers could do would be to want more stuff, not buy it.

The only way Facebook can justify these valuations is if it manages to take essentially all advertising budgets for everything everywhere.

Size of the global advertising market: estimated to reach $500bn in 2012
Google: valued at $189bn
Facebook: $50bn

1. There is a New New Thing that trancends the Old Economics, and you cannot value It the Old Way. This Time It will Be Different

That’s from the now-famous article, 10 steps to see if you’re in a bubble.

This is from the abstract of the keynote for the conference I’m at this week (a big market research one). I’m posting it because it’s rare you see quite such a self-confidently extreme expression of the belief that The Kids are magical tech ninjas. But this is a belief a lot of people - especially in marketing, and to an extent in business in general - profess to hold.

At first it might seem a welcome corrective to the idea that young people are meme-addled autons unable to make real social connections. But of course the two arguments are really one single argument.

(via tomewing)

“Mind reading marketers have ways of making you buy”, hypes New Scientist, in a characteristically excitable but vague article about neuromarketing. They say:

Take a look at the cover of this week’s New Scientist magazine [the central one of three]. Notice anything unusual? Thought not, but behind the scenes your brain is working overtime, focusing your attention on the words and images and cranking up your emotions and memory. How do we know? Because we tested it with a brain scanner.

In what we suspect is a world first, this week’s cover was created with the help of a technique called neuromarketing, a marriage of market research and neuroscience that uses brain-imaging technology to peek into people’s heads and discover what they really want.

Surely you don’t need an EEG to explain why the middle cover won, though? Basic graphic design principles make it clear that it’d be the one readers would prefer:

• ‘New Scientist’ is in red, which grabs the attention (and is more likely to appeal to a male audience) better than primrose yellow
• It’s the only cover that features the main article listing on the top left below the title, a position well known the sweet spot for shoppers’ attention. This is also much easier to read than the dread centre-justify the others use.
• The main article is listed in bigger, capital letters that are again more eye-catching
• It’s the only cover advertising some kind of freebie in a little blue pull-out.

Now I’m not entirely skeptical about the entire premise of neuromarketing - it’s just only really interesting when it gives insights that other research methods can’t reveal. Brainscans are cool when they reveal differences people wouldn’t normally notice:

An international cosmetics firm tested two subtly different versions of an advert using a traditional focus group. They found that one was much preferred over the other, even though volunteers failed to notice any difference between them. This was hardly surprising as they only differed in one 4-second scene in which a female model either looked passively at the camera or touched her cheek with the back of her hand. To find out why this made such an impact, the company hired a group of neuroscientists led by Rafal Ohme of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw. Using EEG imaging of 45 women aged between 25 and 35, they found that the gesture produced a brief but powerful emotional uplift during the crucial scene.

(Journal of Neuroscience, Psychology and Economics, vol 2, p 21).

A comment left by Prof FF Robb is also worth heeding:

In the late ’60s or early ’70s there was a great craze for testing ads, packages, slogans etc. by measuring how eye movements scanned the field and by observing the extent of iris dilation - windows to the soul? The rhetoric was almost identical. But even before that, just after WWII I dimly recollect attempts to use ‘lie detectors’ to test the sincerity of participants responses to questions about brand names, pack designs and ads. There was also a test store in Baker Street equipped with hidden cameras that watched how customers scanned supermarket shelves. Again, almost supernatural powers were claimed and many advertisers were persuaded to invest in this kind of research. If I were your advertising agent, I would caution you against spending too much on this kind of thing although it does bring the same kind of comfort to advertisers that placebos bring to hypochondriacs.

People have talked about the conflicting messages from Dove and Vaseline Fair & Lovely as being perfectly reasonable branding – Unilever tailoring its brands’ advertising so it addresses different beauty trends in two different markets.

It’s still a problem for Unilever, however, because those marketing campaigns haven’t stayed safely confined to their own markets – instead, Vaseline Fair & Lovely is getting a lot of coverage on the Anglo-American parts of the internet. A bunch of Westerners not liking the ads doesn’t just mean they’re not going to buy the Fair & Lovely product – obviously enough we were unlikely to do that anyway. Rather it does two things:

1. Make Unilever look pretty nasty for preying on the caste-driven pressures on young people in India, where skintone can affect employability and marriage options;
2. Makes the ‘niceness’ of Dove really, really visible as a BRAND, as nothing more than a branding trick.

It’s this latter that’s the main problem for Unilever. While anyone seeing the Dove adverts should be aware that, simply enough, they are adverts and therefore they’re trying to sell you something, the ads were good enough and played well enough off an anti-size-zero zeitgeist that they felt quite sincere. They did a really good job of making people like the brand and seeing it as something that’d make them feel good about themselves.

Awareness of what Unilever are doing in other markets, however, makes their brands in this one – i.e. Dove – look very hollow. The success of the Dove campaign was predicated on a kind of cognitive dissonance: consumers could only swallow what it was saying about ‘real women’ and self-acceptance if they didn’t think too hard about it being an advert designed to sell stuff. The Fair & Lovely marketing, though, shows the depths of manipulativeness that Unilever will sink to in order to sell their beauty products, and as such I would argue it’s damaging to other brands in the portfolio.

Maybe that’s the problem with individual product branding… In February my then-colleague Sue Burden said in Marketing Week that, “With the Individual product brand model, the benefits are mainly an absence of possible negatives - no great fear of negative news about a parent or sibling brand affecting them.”

This only works, though, if consumers don’t ‘join the the dots’ between individual brands (Dove; Vaseline Fair & Lovely) and the parent company (Unilever). As this episode would indicate, that can be quite an easy thing for consumers or the media to do – and as such it’s not a very strong advantage.