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Why aren't gruesome warnings enough?
November 22, 2008
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Daphne Gordon
LIVING REPORTER
Smoking kills.
And even while graphic health warnings on cigarette packages make that fact very clear, more than 15 billion cigarettes are sold around the world every day.
But why? It makes little sense that smoking rates are rising in spite of anti-smoking efforts.
According to global marketing guru Martin Lindstrom, Canada's cigarette package health warnings – ours are among the most aggressively icky in the world – can actually cause cravings.
"It's the Pavlov effect. I see that graphic picture and, 10 seconds later, I light up a cigarette. I feel good," says Lindstrom, who was in town recently to launch his new book Buy-ology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy.
After repeated "feel-good" experiences, he explains, an image of a decayed lung can – much like a tobacco company's logo – become closely associated with pleasure.
Anti-smoking TV ad campaigns have a similarly stimulating effect, Lindstrom says, but the reason is a little different.
It's because of "mirror neurons," which fire similarly in the brain whether you're lighting up a cigarette or watching someone else do it.
Since 80 per cent of anti-smoking ads show people smoking, they can trigger mirror neurons in a smoker's brain and, before he knows it, he's digging around in his pocket for a lighter.
This doesn't mean that the campaign to combat smoking has to start from scratch.
"I believe the Canadian health warnings can have some effect, because they're so graphic," he says.
"But they're not having the effect they could have because they're too consistent ...
"You have to have new pictures all the time, new placement, sometimes gone, totally random, so the brain can't link the feel-good feeling with the warnings."
This isn't just Lindstrom's theory. His statements are backed by a large neuromarketing study he did in partnership with Oxford University in which he hooked 2,000 volunteers up to brain-scanning technology.
By exposing his subjects to marketing and advertising strategies while monitoring their brain activity, he found out what works and what doesn't. And it was often surprising.
For example, most smokers reported in interviews that health warnings on cigarettes were a deterrent.
But brain scans showed the nucleus accumbens – the craving centre – lighting up.
The warnings had stimulated the area of the brain that activates when the body desires something, whether it's alcohol, drugs, gambling or sex.
Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) machines are commonly used in hospitals to diagnose tumours, strokes and joint injuries. When used by neuroscientists, they reveal which areas of the of brain are working at any given time.
These same machines are now quietly being used by marketers who want to tap into the real reasons people buy what they buy, since the prevailing marketing research techniques – focus groups and surveys – have so miserably failed to explain consumer behaviour.
"Neuromarketing, it's scary and exciting at the same time," says Lindstrom, whose book is an examination of this emerging marketing research technique.
He points out that this is an area that is not well understood.
Admitting that the technology may come across like "the ultimate intrusion, a giant and sinister Peeping Tom," he argues it has real value and not just to the marketers who are employing it.
Consumers could use information gleaned from brain scans to understand their own sometimes irrational behaviour.
And Lindstrom says such an understanding is becoming a cultural imperative.
In a world of shrinking resources and environmental degradation, we have a moral obligation to examine why we buy.
The results of Lindstrom's three-year, $7-million experiment disproved assumptions about many prevailing marketing techniques. He learned that product placements don't work, brand logos are dead and sex doesn't really sell.
But perhaps most important to Lindstrom were his findings about smoking.
In his view, neuromarketing helps explain why massive efforts by governments and anti-smoking activists haven't worked.
It's clearly a subject he feels strongly about. His book is unofficially dedicated to two smokers, his mother and his girlfriend's mother.
His girlfriend's mother died of cancer, and he writes in his book that counteracting powerful tobacco campaigns is a driving motivation.
Toronto Star