3.

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. First, the occipital lobe, or the
occipital cortex, is part as you can see here in the figure, that is involved in
visual processing. 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. The temporal cortex, as you can see here in orange, is
involved in language, memory and visual perception. The frontal cortex, as you
can see here in purple, is involved in many things such as motive control,
planning, preference and working memory. 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. 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. 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 hippocampus, parietal cortex, entorhinal cortex, cortex
and the amygdala. 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 tend to on 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 and 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, and 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.
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. So the brain is, in a way, merging the
different informations together to present a coherent picture 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, 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 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 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 them in order, 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.