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Buy.ology’s Smart Tips for Online Marketing and Retail

Buy.ology is a captivating read that presents Martin Lindstrom’s foray into neuromarketing – using neuroscience experiments, such as MRI scans, to determine what drives our consumer and shopping habits. Some results are quite thought provoking, such as the fact that consumer warnings on cigarette packs seem to not only fail to deter smoking but even to trigger stimulus responses that encourage smoking!

The book provides some interesting and practical ideas for online marketers:

- Embed your brand in your online experience – in an overly visually stimulated environment, logos and traditional branding have lost some effectiveness. On the other hand, people tend to be much more receptive to brands embedded in the narrative they are trying to sell.

- Generate somatic markers – based on “past memorable experiences of reward and punishment” – are potent decision factors influencing our purchases. A well-known but useful trick to create a long-lasting impression is to bring together two seemingly incompatible elements. The “Will it blend?” videos are an excellent example of that approach, where Tom Dickson from Blendtec tries – and manages – to blend everything, such as an iPhone

- Stimulate “mirror neurons” – mirror neurons are “neurons that fire when an action is being performed and when the same action is being observed”. Watching someone doing something is a powerful invitation to imitate her. Showing videos of users unboxing a product or trying on an outfit they have just received triggers our natural inclination to imitate others. A youtube search for unboxing yields 37K results, such as this example of a buyer unboxing his T-Mobile G1.