I have to admit I am envious. My colleague Graham Page, the global director of innovation at Millward Brown, co-authored a paper with Professor Jane Raymond of the University of Wales, Bangor, which has just received the Best Paper award at this week’s ESOMAR Congress. (Click here for details.) Don’t get me wrong—the paper fully deserves the award. I just wish that I had written it!

The paper, titled Cognitive Neuroscience, Marketing and Research: Separating Fact from Fiction, reviews what neuroscience tells us about the workings of the brain, and applies that learning to the practice of marketing and market research. The paper confirms that many things marketers have long believed to be important are indeed important, and begins to shed some light on the reasons why.

The following are my key takeaways from the paper.

Processing in the brain takes place in modules which deal with different sorts of information. These modules progressively share information with each other in a hierarchical structure. Near the top of that structure are three “mega-modules”: one which handles knowledge about the physical properties of objects, one which deals with actions, e.g. how to use an object, and one which works with emotional responses or evaluations.

At the top of the hierarchy is a control mechanism which determines processing priority. “Using both selective attention and emotion, the brain rapidly assesses whether something in the external world is important for what is needed right now, is needed for something in the future, is actively getting in the way, or is simply irrelevant.” Importantly, Page and Raymond suggest not only that attention and emotion are equal partners in assigning priority, they emphasize the importance of relevance: “… there is a mountain of evidence to show that relevance to current and future tasks is absolutely critical if information of any kind is to be registered at all.”

Critical to the world of marketing is that people use “representations” to understand, make decisions, and interact with the world around them. Representations are made up of little bits of information drawn from externally perceived, remembered or imagined items. According to Page and Raymond, “Research in cognitive neuroscience suggests that a representation of something, say, an ordinary object, a brand, or concept, must have at least three tags, one for each of the mega-modules: knowledge, actions, feelings.”

Most importantly, the greater the strength and clarity of the representation, the more likely it is to take priority in what is called the “workspace,” the brain system that integrates ideas into long-term memory and allows them to be used in decision-making.

Page and Raymond conclude their review as follows:

“These ideas have direct relevance to marketing because what effective marketing does is get people to assemble representations of particular brands, repeatedly, so that they become easy to evoke when the consumer has a relevant decision to make (e.g. during purchase or brand usage). Without gaining entry to the workspace a brand cannot be part of a purchase decision set, for instance. Effective marketing also shapes the nature of the tags so that they make the brand more attractive at the key decision points.  The whole point of marketing should be to provide the consumer with consistent, unambiguous tags for each of the three mega-modules so they can build a brand’s representation rapidly and robustly.”

The paper builds on this point with some new analysis. Page and Raymond examined data from over 8500 interviews on 42 different brands.  Open-ended questions were used to elicit the thoughts and feelings which came to mind in relation to specific brands. The answers were then coded into the three key groups of Knowledge, Action and Emotion. Brands were then scored on two dimensions: the depth of association (i.e., the number of associations which came to mind), and the degree to which those associations were balanced across the three mega-modules. 

The brands were organized into four groups based on these scores:
1) Many associations, balanced across the three mega-modules,
2) Many associations, but not balanced,
3) Fewer associations but balanced,
4) Fewer associations, and not balanced.

As the chart shows, brands in the first group, with high depth of association and balance across Knowledge, Action, and Emotion were, on average, the strongest ones measured by BRANDZTM, with an average Bonding score of 15, and an average Voltage score of 2.99.  High Bonding scores imply that consumers have a strong attitudinal predisposition toward the brand, and high Voltage scores suggest that the brand has the potential to increase market share in the year following the survey.

 

Intriguingly, the next strongest group were those brands with fewer associations but a good balance between the three mega-modules. The two groups with unbalanced associations were both dramatically weaker. This strongly supports the implication of the neuroscience findings: brands need to be strong in all three mega-modules to maximize their potential for success.

Marketers have long believed that brands with strong, differentiated positioning are likely to be more successful than poorly differentiated offerings. This paper now helps us understand how this relates to the way the human brain makes decisions. Brands which quickly and easily form strong representations have the best chance of being chosen in a cluttered environment. Critically, however, the strength of those representations depends on people having a balanced understanding of the brand – one that includes its physical cues, its functional benefits and the emotions evoked by it.

This review touches on just one aspect of this compelling paper (click here to download). I thoroughly recommend reading it in its entirety, not least because it contains further information relevant to the ongoing debate on engagement. Once you have read it, please share your resulting thoughts with us below.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 22nd, 2006 at 4:30 pm and is filed under Other, Research. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. Print this Page