View Full Image
Getty Images Ferrari drivers Fernando Alonso and Felipe Massa embrace after finishing first and second in the Bahrain Formula One Grand Prix earlier this month.
"I'm endlessly impressed by Marlboro's ability to take the core values of Formula One—sex, speed, innovation, coolness—and apply them to a cigarette brand," says Mr. Lindstrom, a vehement anti-smoker himself. "That is an amazing achievement. Just by showing me a red Ferrari car, much more so than if you show them an advert for cigarette smoking.
"On a personal level I hate it, because the evidence is clear that tobacco sponsorship does make people smoke more, and is not just about switching brands, but professionally there is much to recommend.
"Even though that sponsorship is no longer legal we carried out experiments just showing a Formula One car, and people immediately craved cigarettes. What Marlboro has done is create a huge number of what I call 'smashable components' to their brand. They are sending indirect, subconscious signals that are talking to the brain without explicitly telling it we are being sold to."
Mr. Lindstrom believes his findings have fundamental implications for the sport-sponsorship industry. "Sponsorship works when we are not really aware of the signals that are being sent: The messages get through because our guard is down, not up. A Formula One car passing below me with no logo is an example of this, and as a smoker it creates a craving, Pavlovian effect. When there are no logos around my rational mind tells me I shouldn't crave those things. Without the logo my intuition kicks in and I want to smoke."
The tobacco-advertising ban has had a series of unintended consequences, Mr. Lindstrom says. Because firms are unable to use brand logos and conventional channels, the sector was inadvertently liberated from traditional marketing dogma. As a result, cigarette companies are now among the most innovative and sophisticated marketers in the world.
Neuro-marketing remains controversial, but the audience for its findings is growing rapidly among the marketing community, says Paul Brennan of design agency Fitch. He says Marlboro's relationship with McLaren and now Ferrari is aimed at "owning the color red," which remains "the holy grail" for many companies seeking to differentiate themselves from competitor brands.
Mr. Brennan says we shouldn't regard subliminal advertising as a way of "tricking the consumer into buying something they don't want to," but rather as a more innovative way of promoting a brand.
Sponsor logos have become a familiar backdrop to top-class sport around the world, but most are failing to make an impression, according to Mr. Lindstrom's research.
"We are bombarded with thousands of direct-marketing messages a day, very few of which we are able to take in, let alone process in to changing buying behavior," he says. "Having a logo on the perimeter board is not worth the money, there has to be a synergy, where the brand becomes synonymous with the sport, and better still, becomes a ritual.
"Likewise, rights holders must prove that they are about more than just awareness, which is not as valuable a commodity as it was 20 years ago, when the sponsorship model was built that still applies today."
— Richard Gillis is editor of Platform magazine
No comments:
Post a Comment