Module 3 - Sensory Neuromarketing

Literature

Sensory Neuromarketing, NEUROMARKETING COMPENDIUM, 2nd ed p.84 to p.131

"To understand how Neuromarketing works, we need to first understand sensation. Which
basic senses do we have? How do we experience the world around us? Can we use
neuroscience to better understand, assess and influence consumers?

While many companies use odors, jingles, sound themes and other effectors in the attempt
to affect consumers, less is known about how it actually works. How does an odor lead to a
rush of memories from the past? Why does a 2 second jingle make you think of a particular
brand? How do we experience the world as a coherent whole, rather than bits and pieces?

Sensory marketing also has it’s share of hype; companies that suggest that specific odor
“personalities” work specific ways; analyze a company’s use of different senses (or lack
thereof)"
Video 1: Sensory Neuromarketing

Hello and welcome back to this course in neuromarketing and consumer neuroscience.

Today we are going to talk about brain anatomy.

We're going to talk about how the senses work.

We are going to talk about how the brain is making an illusion of the world. And we
are going to talk about how we can map how different senses are influenced as
consumers.

First of all, let's focus on the brain.

We need to understand how the brain works and how it looks.

If you take an overview of how the brain is divided into different sections: we can talk about
at least five different sections.

1. First, the occipital lobe, or the occipital cortex, is part as you can see here in the
figure, that is involved in visual processing.
 2. Second, we have the parietal cortex as you can see in green. And this part of the
brain is involved in, among other things, attention, self-awareness and so forth.
3. The temporal cortex, as you can see here in orange, is involved in language,
memory and visual perception.
4. The frontal cortex, as you can see here in purple, is involved in many things such
as motive control, planning, preference and working memory.
5. And finally, one of the structures that we don't talk too much about is the insula, as
you can see here in light green, which is involved in, among other things, emotions.

If we look more deeply into the brain, you can see that there are several deep structures
of the brain that we need to mention as well.

6. First of all, this is what we call the basal ganglia.

The basal ganglia consists of three different structures, such as:

- the putamen,
- the caudate nucleus, and
 - the ventral striatum or nucleus circumference.
7. If you look more into the medial, or the middle side of the temporal lobe, this is what
we call the medial temporal lobe structures.

That emcompasses such as:

- the hippocampus,
- the parietal cortex,
- the entorhinal cortex, and
- the amygdala.
8. Finally, there's a structure called the cingulate cortex, which is on the middle side of
the inner side of the brain as you can see here in purple.

We tend to divide this structure into:

- the anterior or the frontal part, and

- the posterior or the back part, as well.

What's important to realize about the brain is that there's no structure that is only having
one function.

So you don't see that there is a center for reward, or a center for memory or a
center for this or that.

What you do see instead is that one structure tends to take several roles, and
one function, such as memory, relies on the network of brain regions.
We can think of this as three different concepts.

- Redundancy, which is where a function is performed by two or more

identical regions.
- We have degeneracy, in which a function is performed by two or more
dissimilar regions of the brain.
- And we have what's called pluripotentiality, which is a concept where one
structure can take on many different roles.
In this figure, you see an overview of some of the regions that we will treat in this course, we
will discuss in this course and we will come back to this figure several times.

As you can see, there's a lot of different structures that are important for consumer
behavior.

Some of them are overlapping in their functions.

And some of them are really important for emotions while others are
important for things like memory.

Now let's focus on how we experience the world around us.

And to do this and to just start off by understanding how the brain does this, let's
start with an illusion.

What I want you to do is to draw a dot and a cross on a small piece of paper,
approximately ten centimeters in between.
 What I want you to do then is to hold the paper up in arm's length, and hold
your right eye while you're looking at the cross.

The cross should be on your right side.

By moving the paper slowly towards you, you will see that the dot disappears.

If you then move the paper away or closer to yourself, you will see that the
dot reappears.

What does that tell us?

It tells us that the eyes are not perfect.

They have blind spots.

But it also tells us that the brain is actually filling in with meaning where
there's no meaning.

So even though your experience of the world is incomplete, your

brain tells you a story that it seems to be complete.

In the same way, we can look at different visual illusions, such as this one.
 Here you can see that there are black squares.

But what you can also see is that once you look around the different squares,
in between them there might be some light gray areas.

But once you look at those areas, they disappear.

How about this one?

Do you see a white triangle?

Look closer there's no white triangle. It's just an illusion.

This because the brain is trying to fill in with meaning.

It tries to understand the world around it where there is not

necessarily a meaning at all.

From this we can conclude that the world is, at least part of it, an illusion.

What you see and how we experience the world is not a mere reflection of how the
world actually is.
 It's a reconstruction of the world.

So how does the brain go about recreating the world around us?

Well first of all, it tends to fragmentize the way it treats information.

First, let's look at what the brain does just to a flickering checkerboard.

In this figure and this movie, you can see that if you look at a flickering
checkerboard like this, you will see that the stronger activation of the
primary visual cortex.

Now let's look at movement.

If you look at how the brain is activated to this, we will see that there's
both the primary visual cortex, but also an additional region on
each side of the brain.

This is what we can call the movement regions of the brain.

So the brain is, in a way, merging the different informations together to present a
coherent picture of the flower.

When we look at an object such as a flower, what you can see is that the
brain is treating information about the flower in different regions.

Things like color, shape and movement is treated in different regions

of the brain.

But you don't see the flower as shape here, color here and movement
here.

You have one coherent experience of the flower.

If we look at the bottom part of the temporal cortex or the ventral or inferior temporal
cortex, we can see regions that are specialized for processing faces or places.

There are also two different processing streams of the brain, one that is called a dorsal
stream, and one that is called a ventral stream.
 In the ventral stream that goes from the primary parietal cortex down to the
temporal cortex, we see a lot of information regarding the identity of different
objects.

So your ability to recognize a bottle as a bottle, or a brand as a brand, is

depending on that stream of processing.

Conversely, the dorsal stream is engaged when we are orienting ourselves in the
world, when we are finding our way, or looking at a particular object in space. But
also, how we are working with objects.

So our ability to grasp and hold and manipulate objects depends on the
dorsal stream.

Let's look at examples for touch.

Let's take the example of remote controls.

If you take the remote control to your television set, try to hold it and mark the
weight of it.

What some producers do is to add weight to the remote control, because

many consumers believe that a heavier product is the same as the more
quality products.
 We see the same thing for hammer drills and many other products as well.

Adding weight to a product signifies a higher quality.

Let's look at examples for smell.

For example, shoes, leather shoes.

Today leather is so processed that it almost doesn't contain any odor at all.

So, many producers are actually making up fragrances that smell like leather.

And this produces an authentic leather experience for consumers.

Or take the examples of bakeries.

Just passing by a bakery, it smells delicious, right?

Just adding the odor and passing it onto the street is an excellent advertising
campaign for that single bakery.

In casinos,

Several places you can find that there's a slight odor of lemon.
 Because this has been shown that increased lemon odor also increases risk taking,
especially in men.

How about sounds?

Think about jingles.

Or think about the sound that your mouse makes when you're clicking your
computer, or when you're opening your smartphone.

Do you think that that sound is incidental? No, it's highly designed.

Every single sound that you are aware of when it comes to products is
typically designed.

Even shutting the door of a Mercedes car.

Let's take the example of a single study we did here at the Copenhagen Business School.

In this study we tested the effect of the intensity of an odor and people's preference.

What we found was that increasing the intensity of an odor was pleasant, until a
certain point, after which the preference for that odor drops.

So this means that the more you use an odor, the more people like it until a
certain point.

Interestingly, this was mostly found for women, while for men there was no
such real effect.

To follow up on that study, we also combined intensity of odors with brands.

And what we also found there was that the stronger the intensity of the odor
had an effect on people's preference for the brand, until a certain point after
which, a stronger intensity actually led to a negative effect on brand
preference.

So what we have just seen here is how the senses can affect us as consumers
and how brands can imbue value to our experience of products and brands.
Let's try a way to measure how our senses are influenced as consumers.

Gen Sibley is a famous designer that also has thought a lot about how our senses
are influenced as consumers.

He has made this famous chart of how our different senses are affected.

This is a way that we can rate sensory affection ourselves.

What I'd like you to do is to take a look at the chart here.

On the x-axis you can see the different senses such as, sight, sound,
smell, taste and so forth.

And on the y-axis you can see the range from zero to ten, and this is
strength of the sensory experience.

Now take for example a brand such as Apple.

 Now how much smell does Apple have? Not much,
you'd probably say. So that would be a score of one or
two, maybe.

What then about touch, or sound? How high or low

would you rate the sensory impact that Apple has on
those senses?

We have now made a questionnaire for you to fill out. In this

questionnaire, we want you to rate the different sensory
impacts that many different brands have for you.

You can also do this at home for yourself.

Draw the chart. Use the chart for different aspects. You can do
it on yourself, colleagues, your fellow students, or you can just
do it on the street on random people.

It gives you a very good impression of how people think and feel about
different brands and senses.
Let's look at four different examples that we could use this chart for. Let's take four different
examples.

For example, Nintendo Wii has a high degree of sights and especially touch, but a
low degree of smell. Sound is on the middle and taste is low, of course.

If we were to look at McDonald's, people tend to rate sights and taste high, but things
like sound and touch relatively low.

Going to the opera has a high impact on people's sights and especially sounds, but
very low on touch, smell and taste.

But consider going to a fair. As you can see here, a tentative chart looks like this,
with high impact of sight, touch, smell, sound and taste.

So for this week, please fill out the questionnaire that we have put online. And as soon as we
have completed the survey, we will return to you with the results.

Video 2: