| If you're like most people, you're way
too smart for advertising. You skip right past newspaper ads, never click on ads
online and leave the room during TV commercials. That, at least, is what we tell ourselves. But what we tell ourselves is wrong. Advertising works, which is why, even in hard economic times, Madison Avenue is a Lindstrom is a practitioner of neuromarketing (神经营销学) research, in which consumers are exposed to ads while hooked up to machines that monitor brain activity, sweat responses and movements in face muscles, all of which are markers of emotion. According to his studies, 83% of all forms of advertising principally engage only one of our senses: sight. Hearing, however, can be just as powerful, though advertisers have taken only limited advantage of it. Historically, ads have relied on slogans to catch our ear, largely ignoring everyday sounds--a baby laughing and other noises our bodies can't help paying attention to. Weave this stuff into an ad campaign, and we may be powerless to resist it. To figure out what most appeals to our ear, Lindstrom wired up his volunteers, then played them recordings of dozens of familiar sounds, from McDonald's wide-spread "I'm Lovin' It" slogan to cigarettes being lit. The sound that blew the doors off all the rest--both in terms of interest and positive feelings--was a baby giggling. The other high-ranking sounds were less original but still powerful. The sound of a vibrating cell phone was Lindstrom's second-place finisher. Others that followed were an ATM distributing cash and a soda being burst open and poured. In all of these eases, it didn't take an advertiser to invent the sounds, combine them with meaning and then play them over and over until the subjects being part of them. Rather, the sounds already had meaning and thus fueled a series of reactions: hunger, thirst, happy expectation. |