With each of us receiving more than 30,000 messages a day – everything from news headlines to print, TV, radio, and online advertising – how do today’s marketing professionals have a chance of getting a product or service to stand out?
Dr. Christophe Morin is a “neuromarketer,” combining his expertise in neuroscience with his passion for understanding how to persuade people to do or buy almost anything. T
his week, Dr. Morin talks about the “emotional cocktail” that is our response to advertising messages, and why appeals to the rational brain don’t work. Hit the primal brain using these six strategies, he says, and you’ll get the emotional brain to respond every time.
Plus… did subliminal advertising ever work?
Phil Stieg: Hello, and welcome to Christophe Morin, a pioneer and expert in the field of neuromarketing, which combines neuroscience and marketing in order to better understand the effects of advertising on the human brain.
Today we are here to discuss Dr. Morin’s book, “The Persuasion Code: How Neuromarketing Can Help You Persuade Anyone, Anywhere, Anytime.” Sounds too good to be true, but here we go. Christoph, great to meet you, and thank you for joining us.
Christophe Morin: Thank you so much. It’s such a pleasure.
Phil Stieg: So you came to this, originally you were a neuroscientist, and then you —
Christophe Morin: I was not – I was originally a marketer.
Phil Stieg: Originally a marketer. And then you became a neuroscientist – by design?
Christophe Morin: By design – because, you see, I was so frustrated. To complete the typical research protocol in marketing is to ask people, what do you think? How do you feel? And I very quickly became frustrated because, one, I couldn’t really trust what people would tell me. Two, it also became obvious that they just didn’t have the consciousness, the ability to observe their behavior and decisions. And many of those decisions were happening in milliseconds inside their brain. And therefore, I figured, well, if it’s that quick, I better learn more about the brain and figure a way to safely and ethically monitor brain activity and create metrics that complement what is called self reported techniques.
Phil Stieg: Christophe, can you define what’s different about what traditional people do in a focus group versus what you do in terms of really measuring and deriving brain metrics?
Christophe Morin: Of course. Self-reported methods, including surveys, focus groups, put the cognitive effort onto people to describe their experience. I believe that that data is flawed and only approximative to the real experiences. The reason I developed this set of other techniques is because they do not require people to make necessarily cognitive effort to comment on their impressions. The typical experimental setting is when people are asked to passively watch or interact with media content. It could be a website, could be a commercial. And while they do that, we have sensors that are placed either on their skin, for instance, to measure the sweat activities called skin conduction. Heart rate. Breathing patterns also can be informative as well system.
We go into the visual system by tracking people’s eye movements, what are called gaze fixations, as well as decoding the facial movements. And we have over 40 muscles on our face that are basically placing our face in particular configuration. And the good news about this part of the research, Dr. Ekman long ago demonstrated that as humans, we have common facial expressions for specific emotions. So the software that we use is informed by the teachings of Dr. Ekman so that we can reveal three times per second if people are paying attention or bored or disgusted, or fearful.
And finally, we can use EEG in order to calculate cognitive effort and in fact, cognitive asymmetry. I don’t know if you’ve ever done research like that, but it’s really quite powerful to determine if there is some sort of dominance of either the right or the left frontal lobe. This work was done decades ago by a neuroscientist, and now we use it as neuromarketers, as a predictor of decision making. Left signals that people are about to approach a decision, and right dominance would signal the opposite.
Phil Stieg: What you’re proposing in this book is really an analytical way of looking at how an individual responds.
Christophe Morin: I of course simplify to some extent the very complicated brain systems into two major systems. One that I call primal, which is also what Danielle Kadaman did in his book “Thinking Fast and Slow”. He calls it System One, the part of our nervous system which is attending to our survival purposes. And then the rational brain which he describes as System Two.
So I figured to tap into the primal brain I really needed to look at the peripheral nervous system and capture information that could tell me more about emotions, about our state of attention, especially early attention. And so the methods became obvious as I was looking for the kinds of research questions that marketers struggle with all the time. What’s going on within the first few seconds that can explain why people jump off a website in just a few seconds? What can we tell about the visual tracking of the areas of interest in a commercial that seems to engage more so than text or voiceover?
Phil Stieg: The thing I find most interesting is the whole facial imaging analysis looking at the slightest twitching of an eye or whatever. Voice analysis in terms of the way they do it. I mean, it’s really you’re looking at almost every potential biological response that I could have to something you put in front of me.
Christophe Morin: Exactly. And of course many of those technologies were not necessarily used for this purpose. For instance, voice analysis is a technology I found in Israel where they have urgencies around monitoring terrorists’ activities and they found that while they could not necessarily identify what people say particularly, and they speak using codes.
They do have voice patterns that are encoded in the voice recording. And those voice patterns can signal the presence of very specific emotions like anger or confusion or the intention to deceive. And so, I repurposed that technology for conducting in depth interviews during which I could listen and transcribe what people tell me. But on top of that, I would have my emotional highlighter coming from those patterns of voice data.
Phil Stieg: What I liked about the book was you made it easy to understand. I mean, when you talk about the primal brain, that’s a term everybody can grab onto instead of the limbic system. What the heck is that?
Christophe Morin: That’s right.
Phil Stieg: And then the rational brain is the higher part of the brain. It seemed in reading through the book that most of us make our decisions almost instantaneously and emotionally. Is that true?
Christophe Morin: Yes, I do believe the primal brain is the first system to respond for good reasons. The urgency of keeping us alive far exceeds the need to fully understand what’s going on. And so when you walk in a forest and there is a stick that looks like a snake, you don’t necessarily approach it. You move away from it. And this is like a knee jerk response. You don’t really have the time to think about it. I like to say that consciousness is very slow. It’s overrated in many ways. But the primal brain has the capacity to frankly hijack our entire body in order to save us because the cost of making a bad decision is not as important as not making the decision at all.
Phil Stieg: So during the election seasons, I mean, how many TV networks have these focus groups where they monitor heart rate. It seems to me that if I want to know what Christophe is thinking, that’s not the most effective way because there’s peer group pressure and all the other things.
Christophe Morin: I agree. And that’s why there’s been so many discussions around polling people about what their votes will be. And then after the vote has been cast to find these huge discrepancies. We simply don’t necessarily do what we say we’re going to do. I do understand that we have this beautiful rational brain, this neocortex, but the truth is it’s costly to use and operate and our default is much more to follow whatever direction the primal brain is giving us.
Phil Stieg: Clearly, you’ve convinced me that the primal brain is something that we really need to look at when we’re trying to push something. And you talk about the Primal Bias model. You had about six categories. Can you go through those for us?
Christophe Morin: Of course. The first is the need to protect from threats and suffering. And so the Primal Brain has in its programming, real urgency around vigilance. And vigilance, I like to say, is kind of the default program of the primal brain. In advertising alone, we receive 30 to 40,000 messages per day. That message could be a landing page. It could be a billboard. It could be an ad on the radio.
How can we unhook from what we are doing unless we receive a message that does speak to the primal Brain? And that message, in my opinion, should take into account threats, suffering, hurdles, frustrations that people find intolerable. And so to the extent that you do that, you’re demonstrating your ability to diagnose the “why” behind your product or service. And two, you’re also finding a way to hijack whatever equity of attention you need to deliver your message. So that’s the first one.
The second one. In the primal brain, we don’t have the luxury of computational neurons that would give us excitement around assessing 15 reasons why we should buy this product. We want to be done with a decision. We have the bias of accelerating decisions, which is why whenever you sell anything, you have to create a shortlist. And that shortlist, at least in my research, is really no more than three what we call claims. As you know, our frontal lobe is also not very skilled at manipulating more than three blocks of information. So from that perspective, I encourage people to use contrastible stories or claims that really establish right away, “this is the path that I’m guiding you to”, not “please examine all our reasons”, which most marketers tend to do.
Number three, the primal brain doesn’t have a lot of cognitive appetite. Yes, we can do basic math, but for the most part, we are not that interested in engaging in cognitive processing. So we need to work much harder than most marketers do to simplify the message. Nobody is going to ever complain that you made it easy on their brain to understand the reasons why you should buy from them. And it’s so amazing to me how many messages are complicated and people don’t even see the complication. Like in Super Bowl ads. A lot of those messages have intense voiceover, and if you turn off the audio of most of those ads, you’ll never understand what they’re talking about. Voiceover is extremely painful for processing purposes and energy purposes, and most marketers ignore it.
Phil Stieg: Kind of gets back to what you said earlier. The brain is about conserving energy, not expending energy.
Christophe Morin: Exactly!
Phil Stieg: It’s the keep it simple, stupid.
Christophe Morin: Exactly. And it’s true. I mean, those principles exist. People have said that. David Ogilvy, who’s a very famous, very skilled advertiser, said, to sell it’s easy, all you need to do is light the fire under people’s chair, (ie. reawaken the pain), and then present the extinguishers. Now look at how many messages are all about the extinguishers, and they sort of assume they make it implicit. Well, our primal brain is not an implicit brain. You’ve got to make it clear to me that you’re on a mission to eliminate what I cannot find tolerable .
Phil Stieg: But You’ve got to make it memorable. Also, a fire under the seat, you’re going to remember it because it burned. But not every message is memorable. How do you do that?
Christophe Morin: And that’s the fourth bias. As you know, our brain really sucks at remembering. Let’s be clear, right? I always say our brain is, I think, more designed to forget than it is to remember. On top of that, most of what we remember is done while we sleep, right? So I tell my clients, you have to work much harder to make your message sing. Almost like a jingle. That annoying jingle we can’t get out of our head. That should be your message. And so we teach very basic techniques of making your message rhyme.
We teach repetition. Repetition may be annoying, but it works. (laugh) And so how do you do that? Well, by repeating the same message, not by changing it all the time, which is a common mistake of most advertisers. And, of course, advertisers make money only to the extent that they change your message often, and so they’re biased towards changing your message all the time.
Phil Stieg: I’m aging myself, but it reminds me of the old AlkaSeltzer “plop plop fizz fizz” ad. It transformed that company way back when, whatever that was, it’s it just caught on.
Christophe Morin: Precisely. It does pay to repeat.
Number five is really our dominance of the visual system. The visual cortex is occupying roughly a third of the space in the brain. I’ve read some data points which suggest that at any given point, nearly 50% of our entire energy in the brain, is used metabolized for some sort of visual processing function.
Phil Stieg: The final step in your primal bias model was about emotion. Why is that important?
Christophe Morin: So I became very interested in the neurobiological basis of emotions. There’s tons of models. Many of them are based on our rational understanding of emotions, which seems a little paradoxical. But it’s clear to me that emotions have this purpose of either helping us approach a situation or avoid it.
Some people have argued that we could experience nearly 60,000 emotions during our lifetime and yet we only have 6,000 words to describe them. So what became important for me is to research emotions and their contributions to persuasion. And the research states very clearly that we need emotions to actually push or influence a decision.
Antonio Damasio, a very prolific and incredible researcher, has proven that people who have disease limbic areas can’t make decisions at all. And so we need to recruit the emotional system. He said we’re not thinking machines that feel, we’re feeling machines that think from time to time. I love that quote from Damasio, it says it all.
The other thing that I found out is emotions can be considered the glue of your message. We tend to remember more when events are emotional. And in fact, that process of emotional marking is not even conscious most of the time. That’s why any of us would remember where we were and how we felt when we learned about the destruction of the Twin Towers. This won’t be a big effort to retrieve because the emotional cocktail created the glue of the message. So I tell my client, you can be neutral as you want, but this is a complete waste of time and money. And I have so many customers that are trapped into brand rules or politically correct and so on. And by the time you look at this, it’s as neutral as chewing gum commercials.
Phil Stieg: White bread.
Christophe Morin: Right? A white bread, exactly. And they are afraid, actually, of having a tone, an emotional tone. So the one thing you can actually give to the people who make Super Bowl commercials, they’re not terribly afraid. The problem is they’re putting glue on a message has zero substance. So it’s not going to be terribly helpful. But if you do what I recommend you do, if you really work on crafting a narrative that is informed by pain, by claims, and by gain evidence, then that glue is going to be absolutely necessary.
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Narrator: Can images that flash by too quickly for us to really see influence what we buy? Decades ago, marketers claimed success with the technique, called “subliminal advertising.” Some called this a dangerous experiment in mind-control. Or was it merely an overhyped stunt based more on advertisers’ wishful thinking than on science?
Excerpt from movie intermission clip:
“Let’s all go to the lobby, To get ourselves a treat!”Narrator: This catchy jingle—accompanied by singing and dancing popcorn and candy boxes—appeared in movie theaters in the 1950s, to remind audiences about all the delicious snacks available at the concession stand. But some advertisers wondered if they could convince people to buy movie snacks with “invisible” ads.
In 1957, market researcher James Vicary told reporters that during a recent showing of the movie “Picnic” at a theater in New Jersey, single frames of ads were flashed onscreen every five seconds.
Excerpt from “Picknic”
Hal: I love you Madge, do you hear?
Flo: Millie, I want you in the house this minute!
Hal: Do you love me? Do you? Listen baby, you’re the only real thing I ever wanted..Narrator: The inserted frames, which read “Drink Coca-Cola” and “Hungry? Eat Popcorn,” were only visible for a fraction of a second. Vicary claimed that after the screening, Coke sales increased by about 18% and popcorn sales went up nearly 60%.
Vicary’s press conference backfired. In the U.S. and the U.K., news of the unauthorized test was met with outrage from consumers who felt deceived and manipulated. What’s more, Vicary couldn’t duplicate the test’s results, and he later admitted to fabricating the numbers.
For the next three decades, scientific studies of subliminal advertising seemed to confirm that it didn’t work. But beginning in the 1990s, new research suggested otherwise. Since then, multiple studies have found that subliminal messages do register in our brains. Brain imaging shows that when subjects watch subliminal messages, activity levels change not only in the visual cortex but in the amygdala, which processes emotions; and in the hippocampus, where memories form.
Studies also showed that subliminal messages can’t hypnotize you or dramatically change your behavior. Ian Zimmerman, an experimental psychologist, wrote in Psychology Today that subliminal ads could influence consumers—but only up to a point and “not very powerfully.”
In other words, subliminal ads might make you briefly crave a certain type of soda, but they won’t compel you to get up off your couch and go to the store to buy some.
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Phil Stieg: Of the five senses, visual is the most important to hook somebody with?
Christophe Morin: In my reading, that’s where the primal brain goes. And economically, the eyes are connected straight to the primal brain. And the optic track, of course, continues all the way to the back of our head. But our first hub of visual processing is in the primal brain.
There’s this tiny little area, which I like to brag about called the superior colliculus, and this is our first visual station. Without consciousness, we can see and we see in milliseconds. In fact, there are cases called blindsight cases of people who have diseased visual cortices but have an impeccable superior collicus, and they can actually orient themselves without technically the capacity to see like a normal person.
So, yes, I do believe that the speed and the volume of information that we get from the visual sense is enough to deliver a story in just a few milliseconds. And I tell people, lead with a visual, and if you’re lucky, it will elaborate from visual to the reading and the cognitive, which is what I call the bottom-up effect, the primal first and the rational second.
Phil Stieg: In your book, you showed that photograph of the great white shark swimming behind somebody. It obviously caught my eye in terms of personal survival and the relevance to preparing with insurance. Can you give us some examples in your world of how you’ve reached people through the primal brain and transformed behavior?
Christophe Morin: So this campaign you’re suggesting on insurance is a very interesting one. Insurance is an interesting industry. I’ve worked for Prudential Insurance and others. They tend to go about their products in a rational way. It’s very text centric. It’s very much designed to demonstrate that there is a logic behind buying life insurance. Well, the evidence is pretty clear.
Nobody wants to talk about their death. If you fail to actually confront that, your message is not never going to be hitting the parts in the brain that are supposed to be involved in the decision of talking to an agent. Right?
So text is never going to trigger that decision. But showing this poor lady in the picture who’s trailed by a shark for just a few seconds helps people wake up to the reality of their death and the fact that you can die not just from a disease, but from an accident. And so this very small and presumably short event may be just enough to nudge the rational brain into, whoa, maybe it’s time that I actually talk about this possibility that I could be disappearing from this Earth.
Phil Stieg: So I get that in the insurance world. But I couldn’t help thinking about the luxury market. Where’s the pain point in a luxury market? Do I want to buy a Felique Petite watch versus some other major name brand? Do I want Louis Vuitton versus something else. I don’t see pain there.
Christophe Morin: I do.
Phil Stieg: Oh, you do? Okay, enlighten me. That’s why you’re doing this job.
Christophe: The great philosopher Spinoza, 500 years ago suggested that pain and pleasure were basically the same thing. And I believe the evidence that we have on neuropathways that either stimulate or inhibit our responses are essentially the same. Right. And so to me, people who feel they need that last Rolex, are in pain of not being visible enough or not important enough.
Now, are they going to ever talk about it that way? Of course not. And so luxury is really a response to presumably frustrations or fears that some people have of not appearing as important, as rich as they really are.
Phil Stieg: So let me turn this around. I was having a conversation about healthcare in America is going to be dependent upon convincing people that they can prevent their disease. Diabetes, obesity are all preventable diseases. How do we start an ad campaign to get people to realize that so that they buy the right food and live the appropriate life? We’ve known about this for 100 years, but we still haven’t achieved that goal. Give me some insight.
Christophe Morin: Oh, it’s such an important topic and I’ve given my time to a lot of cause related or PSA related campaigns. And so there are ways to activate more interest and I think more responsibility by using these principles.
Since you and I share the love of old campaign, so to speak, the campaign against drugs, which featured eggs, is in all people’s mind. This is your brain. Okay. This is my brain? This is the brain on drugs. Okay? Well, as simplistic as this may be, millions of people remember this campaign. Millions of people develop this fear, which at some level, especially when it comes to illegal drugs, you have to be in a state of fear to activate the primal brain.
Phil Stieg: So is this the emotional cocktail that you’re referring to?
Christophe Morin: It is.
Phil Stieg: What we’ve got to find?
Christophe Morin: Yes.
Phil Stieg: And so, for everything that we want to persuade somebody on. We’ve got to find the emotional cocktail.
Christophe Morin: Without an emotional lift. You’re leaving people hanging into that fear state. That’s not at all what I’m recommending. I’m recommending that in order to move through the process of persuasion, you have to put, even if it’s just a few seconds, people into that primal connection so that they understand that your intention, your product, your services are all about lifting you up. That’s the dopamine effect. That’s what the Dopamine will ultimately reward, is this anticipation that you can be lifted out of your misery.
Phil Stieg: Yeah, well, hopefully we’ll be able to do it for the preventable diseases – from your lips to God’s ears.
Christophe Morin: Look, I’m making this public, but if you know of an organization or work with an organization that needs help and would be open to my scientific approach, I’m all game. I’m really in appoint in my life–
Phil Stieg: –I’ll be in touch!
Christophe Morin: OK…
Phil Stieg: So my last question then will be what do you think we need to do in the future? I mean, clearly in reading your book, people can be manipulating or trying to manipulate my mind any day, any moment, whether I turn on my digital device, I turn on my TV. What do I, as an individual, need to do to make sure that I’m not a victim of that?
Christophe Morin: That’s a great question. Number one, since the visual channel is the most dominant, protect yourself by not openly watching as much content, whether it’s from advertising or news media especially. So there’s an instant way to protect yourself from the stimulation that you may receive.
Number two, if you learn the model, then you may learn ways to protect yourself from emotional cocktails that do not seem authentic or somehow push you into committing a purchase or a contract that doesn’t really serve you. So being able to recognize also that we may not like to think, but thinking is good for us, right? And have more deep appreciation for our rational brain. This poor system that is desperate sometimes to help us and ultimately doesn’t do much if we constantly shortcut using the primal brain.
Phil Stieg: So your solution is a better educational system to get people to think more?
Christophe Morin: Yeah, of course.
Phil Stieg: Christophe, it’s been a delightful time sitting here chatting with you, talking about the interplay between the primal emotional portion of our brain and the rational cognitive parts of our brain, and the role that they both play in our decision process, either in marketing, but even more importantly, from my perspective as a doctor, in terms of our lifestyle and our behavior and our relationships with one another. Thank you so much for being with us.
Christophe Morin: Thank you so much for inviting me. It’s a real pleasure.