Biznik Blog

Martin Lindstrom:  Thank you so much.  Thanks for your kind introduction.

Leif Hansen:  Oh, sure.  You getting any sleep with all the press?  I know you were on the Today Show yesterday and I think ABC News tonight.  You’ve been pretty busy.

Martin Lindstrom:  Yeah.  It’s fun.  You know it’s fun because the timing of Buyology is just so perfect somehow.  Because we’re in the middle of a crisis right now it means that retailers in a comma, what the heck do they do now to survive.  Consumers are in a comma right now.  What the heck do they do to survive.  And here I am with “Buyology” talking about how to award it and how to push it on both sides, right?  So that’s perfect timing.

Martin Lindstrom:  Actually, yes and no.  I must admit in other countries – you have to remember “Buyology” is released in 35 languages across the world yesterday.  So I did see some press reports from Israel from Denmark actually where they’re spelling it like it was “Biology” the real way.  And it’s kind of amusing because I can see people really don’t understand how does it work.

Leif Hansen:  I wonder if you’ll get invited to be a guest on some sex talk radio show.

Martin Lindstrom:  Well you know, remember one of my chapters is about sex anyway so I would not be surprised.

Leif Hansen:  Yes, that’s true.  And you’ll have something to say won’t you.

Martin Lindstrom:  Yep.

Leif Hansen:  Before I dive into any particular specific questions, I was wondering if you want to just give us a general overview about the book “Buyology” and anything I may have missed about you yourself.

So, that is the problem we have.  Because when we ask consumers things, really they don’t know how to answer it because it’s taking place in our subconscious mind.  In fact, 85% of everything you and I do everyday, from walking down the supermarket isle and taking down Skippy’s or when we pick up a Corona beer from Mexico and we squeeze a lime down in the bottle neck.  Or when we just look at the warning disclaimers or the health warnings on the cigarette packs and still smoke away.  Those things are decided by our subconscious mind.

Leif Hansen:  Wow.

Martin Lindstrom:  What we wanted to do was to make it serious.  So we’ve been scanning 2,000 consumers across five countries using the most sophisticated brain research technique available today on this planet earth.  And the outcome has basically been to figure out what is really going on in our brain.  So we’re basically combining science with marketing.  And I don’t need to tell you the findings in Buyology is absolutely sort of controversial because it is the first time ever.  We’re discovering that some of this stuff we’ve done for 50, if not 100 years, is totally wrong and that’s what Buyology is all about.

Martin Lindstrom:  Well honestly, one thing I was really surprised about was first of all, that we’re smoking more.  In fact, an average person across the world that’s a smoker is smoking 13% more over the last three years.  And I find that shocking because I thought we were smoking less. 

Because of that, I said to myself, “How come?”  You know smoking is almost banned indoors around the world.  Advertising for smoking is banned.  We know it’s not really healthy for you.  How come people puff away?

So I wanted to do a study around that.  And what we did was to look at those health warnings on the cigarette packs.  And scanned them while consumers literally were lying in those huge fMRI scanners, watching them.  And what we learned was absolutely shocking.  We learned that not only are those warning or health disclaimers not work, in fact, they had the total opposite effect.

Martin Lindstrom:  Actually, even more right?  And I must admit, before I went into that particular experiment, I would have thought, yeah, they probably don’t work.  But that they make you smoke even more was really mind blowing.  And that is the reason why I try to spend enormous resources on exploring why is that.  You know what is going in our brain.  When I tell you you’re going to die, how come you want to smoke then?  And that has really created the entire foundation for what we call “subconscious communication” and everything that goes on, every way around us which we’re not even aware of.

Leif Hansen:  Wow!  That’s fascinating.  You know one of the subconscious factors that I’m wondering about, the word on the street right now, especially Wall Street, is obviously people are afraid to spend these days.  In your research, was there any information about the role of fear and feeling safe when it comes to people’s purchasing decisions?

Right now, Wall Street and the financial community is driven by fear.  And what the result is, is very simple.  When you are under enormous pressure, enormous stress, and under fear pressure in general, and what happens is that your amygdala is really activated. 

And I want to give you a parallel.  Imagine that you were out in the jungle for some reason and you happen to meet a tiger.  Well I bet you the second time you go back to the jungle and you hear the same sound as the first time when you met that tiger, you would be on serious alert.

So the reality is we’re much more on alert and what happens in the marketing and branding communities right now, that they’re going to use fear as a main driver to make us buy more.  On the consumer’s side, you will also see we’re going to react much differently because we’re going to react very, very irrationally because the amygdala is control of what’s happening right now.

Martin Lindstrom:  Well I think first of all I want to say one thing, which is really important.  If you are small and a start-up, you have one strength, which is so much stronger than any of the big corporations.  Do not be fooled because you actually have some strength.  And that strength is that you are flexible and you can take risks without it really costing a fortune.

You see, if you take the IBM’s of the world or the Coke’s of the world, they have to be politically correct in everything they do.  Everything has to be clean and perfect in every piece of communication they’re on.  Now guess what, if you’re an entrepreneur, if you’re a small start-up, you can be offensive.  You can go to the limits.  You can be aggressive.  You can do things that they can’t do.  And that’s really what you have to do right now because people are so afraid of sticking out right now in the society, you have to go the opposite way.

Leif Hansen:  That’s great.

Martin Lindstrom:  The second piece of advice is to be incredibly creative.  And ideally, I did a very interesting campaign a couple of years ago in Australia.  It was a small pizza guy who came up to me and he said, “Martin, you know you’re giving advice to all those Fortune 100 brands but can you handle advice to a small start-up.”  And I said, “Sure, bring it on!”

He said, “Well I have an ambition.  The business, I want to be the biggest pizza chain in Asia.”  I said, “You must be kidding.”  He said, “Yeah.”  “What’s your budget?”  I said.  He said, “Well $2,000.”  I said, “Whoa!  That’s a bit of a challenge here.”  But I said, “No, I think it’s possible.”

Now think about that one.  That was the day the whole competition was ripped out.

Leif Hansen:  That’s brilliant!

Martin Lindstrom:  And it was a smart idea and it’s actually one of the reasons why this is one of the biggest pizza chains in Australia/Asia Pacific right now. 

But what my story here is that you can do these things.  Big companies do not dare to do these things.  You have to be incredibly creative.  And what I typically say to big corporations is cut your marketing budget in half.  While I will take it back to you it maybe you have a budget of let’s say $20,000, cut it in half.  Because it will force you to be different and that’s really important.  So that’s the second advice.

Now, my philosophy is smash your brand.  Meaning is it possible for you to survive without a logo.  Imagine we took all the communication you have, your website, your business cards, your letterheads, perhaps if you have an ad in the paper or whatever you have.  Let’s imagine we remove that logo and see what’s left.  Will you be left in a situation where, gee, you could be anyone.  If that’s the case, you have a problem.

Leif Hansen:  Yes, I was going to ask you…

Martin Lindstrom:  I have a business card.  And I bet you if you and I had a chance to meet, if I gave you my business card, you will never forget my business card because it has a folded corner.  And it’s orange on the back and it’s black on the front.  And this corner is folded and it has the word “Brand” raised or embossed into this little corner.

Now the reason why I do this is because when people come up to me and they want me to sign my book, I noticed that those people which really like my writing had folded a lot of corners.  There’s all these dog ears.  And I realized, “Gee, that’s my brand.”  There’s also another story in Denmark saying, where I’m born and raised, that if you visit someone and they’re not at home, fold a corner of your business card and leave it in the letterbox.

So that’s three reasons why you will never forget my business card.  And guess what, the price tag is .06¢ more than an ordinary card.

Leif Hansen:  I was going to ask you if you fold them yourself or if you found a service to do that.

Martin Lindstrom:  Well no, you could buy it that way.  It was a bit difficult in the beginning.  But I can tell you one thing, in the end of the day, it really pays off.  Because I’ve had people sending email to me asking me if they could buy my card for $50, just a business card, right?  And that is branding.  This is branding right?

Leif Hansen:  That’s excellent.  Now I thought you were going to tell us with the research you found about fragrance that all your business cards had some special fragrance on them that you had to scratch.  Now there’s great.

Martin Lindstrom:  You know what, it actually has a smell, the new ones we’ve developed.  But you know what, I want to ask you another question.  If you go out to websites, and you’ve spend a lot of time on websites I know.  If you go out to websites, how many websites have a branded, just a small branded signature sound when you go into the website?  Do you remember any?

Leif Hansen:  Very few.  It’s happened just once or twice.  And I know obviously when you go to your site, you sneak out of the dark and start talking to us.

Martin Lindstrom:  Yeah, exactly.  And do you know what?  The reality is that sound does not cost extra to put on your website.  We all have speakers, how come we only use one sense?  I’m not saying it should be like a nightclub to go into your website.

Martin Lindstrom:  What I’m saying, if you have a small tune in there, if you give people the ability to cut it away if they don’t want to listen to it that is making people remember the site.  And you just mentioned my website, you know.  The martinlindstrom.com website is basically built on sound the whole way through.  And of course it maybe a little too much sometimes but people can cut it away. 

My experience is, and from the research study we’ve done with Buyology, people actually remember the website 60% more, 60% more.  So this is a really quick way to gain a lot of attention and make sure that you’re sticking.

Leif Hansen:  That’s great.  Now specifically, those are all wonderful about being creative, about standing out and kind of breaking some rules.  And taking a smaller budget and finding new ways to be creative are great.  I’m wondering even more particularly with the economic stress and fear that people feel what about marketing in that perspective?  Are there things that you have done or just any other advice knowing that people are in a place where they’re more afraid to buy?  Are there ways to be sensitive, are there ways to speak to that, are there ways alleviate those fears?

So what do you do?  First of all, you make sure that when you give discounts you do it in an alternative way.  That means I buy two products for the price of one or you get 25% more of the same thing, where things were the discount is indirect rather than direct.  That’s number one.

So that means go out, team up with other companies.  There are a lot of companies out there which have done this.  Think about if I buy that product, my product, what is it really fitting with, what other products is it fitting with and create that offer.  So that’s advice number two.

Martin Lindstrom:  That’s OK.  Advice number three, really important.  I personally think that right now you can probably work a little bit more on fear than normal.  I’m not a huge fan of it because I don’t want our society to end up in fear.  But you should be smart here.  Two days ago, Wal-Mart was announcing that they have a financial advisor.  Was basically put on the website and where you can ask that person for advice about how to shop.  I call it a little bit like having the wolf keeping an eye on the sheep here because it’s a bit ironic I think.

Leif Hansen:  Got you.

Martin Lindstrom:  So in the end of the day, and this is accounting for every product category, every service category, put a limit on it.  Just say, “maximum this”, “period of time available”, maximum number item per customers instead of going the discount way.  This is an indirect way of working on fear but it is a way, which is incredibly powerful.  And no matter how tricky it is it actually works every time.  So these are three quick advice which I think you guys can learn from.

I’ve got a question already here from – where did that question go?  I have a question here from Judy in San Francisco and she says, “Many Bizniks like me are primarily selling services.  Does your research say anything specifically relevant to those of us offering services versus products?”

Martin Lindstrom:  Definitely, Judy, and I wish you could call in right now because I want to ask you what service business you are in and I’ll give you some concrete advice.  So if you can email back and just tell me what business you are in right now, then I’ll give you some concrete advice.

I’ll give you an example.  I was in Chicago the other day, staying at the Peninsula Hotel.  And the Peninsula is well-known for having a CD library.  So I went up to my room, I wanted to listen to music so I called down in reception and I said, “Can I borrow some CD’s?”  And the guy there said, “I’m sorry Mr. Lindstrom.  You know we don’t have the library up and running yet.”  And he said to me, “What music do you like?”  I said, “I like ABBA, I like Eminem, I like the Beatles.”

Now this story I’ve told to probably two million people on stage.  I’ve written it in my last book, the “Buyology” book.  I had it in my TV shows and radio shows.  Around 15 million people have heard this story and the price tag, $22.50.  And that is my fundamental issue around service.  That we today really like to receive a little bit more by surprise and that’s real important. 

Judy, did you have time to send an email back and telling me what business you’re in?

Leif Hansen:  I have not gotten an email back from Judy but you know what?  I’m going to steal her opportunity and I’ll give you my example.  How’s that?

Leif Hansen:  So Martin, some of what I do is offer training and consulting with a really experiential twist.  So I work with people doing team building, doing strategic planning, basically helping people to move forward on their goals.  One of the unique things that I do is I do this online and offline.  So I kind of catalyze people and move them forward.  So that’s my service and I don’t know if you want to have something specific about that.

Martin Lindstrom:  Well I think the most important thing is in your industry that you need to give freebies away all the time.  Now, you probably notice if you go into my website, martinlindstrom.com, you’ll notice there’s all those “virtual Martins” as we call them.  There’s mini versions of me walking around on my website literally, right?

Leif Hansen:  Yeah.

So I would take all the good advice you have and combine it into 20, 30-second sound bytes and I’ll share it with people front and center and guess what?  People want to have more.  So that’s my advice to you.

Leif Hansen:  That’s great.  Thank you.  And hopefully she’ll follow-up so you can then speak to her.  I do have another question from Jeff in Palo Alto.  Jeff asked if you could explain a bit more about the mirror neurons he read a little bit on your site and is having a hard time understanding that.

Now what was going on here?  Well let me just take you back in time to 1989 in Palma, in Italy.  There was a professor there which I was acquainted in was discovering the mirror neurons.  And it was actually in Italy a monkey would suddenly was wanting to something it did not even do.  A professor came into the lab, he was holding an ice cream in his hand.  And as he lifted his ice cream to his mouth, basically the monkey was imitating exactly that reaction in the brain without moving the arms.  And that was the first ever we learned that empathy is basically working in such a way that we are imitating what people are doing around us.  We are hardwired to do that.

This is interesting, let me just do an experiment with you.

Leif Hansen:  OK.

Martin Lindstrom:  All of you guys, close your eyes now and then imagine that you go back in time to those days where we had these old blackboards.  Do you remember in school where you’re doing those notes on?  Now take your long nails on your hand and scratch them down.  Can you feel it?

Leif Hansen:  Aaack!

Martin Lindstrom:  Exactly!  This is mirror neurons in action.  In fact, I didn’t even play the sound but I bet you, most of you felt a terrible feeling down the spine.  What we’ve learned and what I’m exploring in Buyology is exactly that phenomenon.  How we can we leverage the mirror neurons to make you feel something without even saying it.  And that’s the way we seduce people to buy more stuff.

Leif Hansen:  But you have to have a certain mass don’t you, of the cool for it to be considered cool?

Martin Lindstrom:  No, not really.  Because I would say – no.  For example, take Blended.  If you take some of the various notes, half of campaigns which are running right now, many of them actually can use mirror neurons.  And I keep going in detail with that in my book where I give concrete advice to how to use the mirror neurons and how to build it into your brand so it really becomes powerful for a price tag of next to nothing.

Martin Lindstrom:  That is right, yes.  And I’m also doing a huge conference, a Buyology Symposium running with Advertising Age next year in February and March.  And also, check out my website, martinlindstrom.com.  There are a lot of free advice, lots of freebie deals.  There are more than 100 videos from around the world.  So check it out.  I hope I’ll meet you out there sometime. 

Leif Hansen:  That will be great.  And Martin, when you do come to Seattle, do you think you’d be open to us setting up a Biznik event for you?

Martin Lindstrom:  I will very, very delighted to have it, have a chat and see what we can do with that.

Thank you, Martin, again for your time.  I look forward to spending some more time with you in the future.

Martin Lindstrom:  A pleasure and good luck with your Buyology.  Take care everyone.

Leif Hansen:  All right.

Martin Lindstrom:  Bye-bye.

Leif Hansen:  Bye-bye.