"What the target audience says often has nothing to do with what they actually think"

Werbewoche: Hans-Georg Häusel, decisions happen in the brain largely unconsciously and always emotionally. So is it illusory to try to influence purchasing decisions with marketing measures?
Hans-Georg Häusel: No. Of course, I often have no influence on what is unconsciously absorbed by the brain. But our brain - including the consumer brain - takes in stimuli from the environment, and advertising is one of these stimuli. What the brain then does with these stimuli runs unconsciously, but can still influence decisions.

But if the gut is our brain, how is it possible to influence purchasing decisions in a targeted way?
That's possible, even if you can't turn the consumer into a puppet. The consumer, the customer, will always remain a bit of a closed book, and we should have no illusions about that. We can't predict reactions one hundred percent. That's because we're not dealing with a blank brain, but with a human being who, in many ways, is a
areas has quite a lot of prior experience, and this prior experience initially eludes your marketing measures. But if you do it right, you can reinforce behavioral and thus buying tendencies.

There is not THE customer, THE buying behavior: What can marketers and advertisers base the development of communication measures on anyway?
First of all, you have to know how communication works in the brain, which emotion systems there are, how perception works and which stimuli work and which do not. What can I do to emotionalize? How can I create attention for my message? Brain research can answer these questions. But in all of this, of course, it's about making it all purposeful, and that brings us to the question of target audience. There are several dimensions to the target audience. Social dimensions: What milieu is someone growing up in? Neurobiological dimensions: Age and gender. Neuropsychological dimensions: What is the consumer's emotional makeup? And cultural dimensions: What cultural background does the consumer come from? There are a number of influencing factors that determine whether what a marketer comes up with is relevant or not.

Can you give a concrete example to illustrate how to do clever neuromarketing?
So, we always start by assuming that emotions are the main deciders - but they're not the only ones, I'd like to emphasize, because social factors are often just as important. For example, I consider: I want to approach a young man between the ages of 20 and 30. Then I know very well that his testosterone and dopamine levels in the brain are relatively high and that he is very adventurous. So my stimuli have to be loud and they can definitely be charged with sexual components. If you deliver on that, you're already going to resonate relatively well with this target audience. If you send the same message to an older 65-year-old lady, you'll reap indignation and she'll say, "That's way too loud and way too violent for me.

If there is not THE customer, can advertising and marketing even target larger groups of customers?
It depends on what your product is. Example: Take two brands from the automotive sector, for example Volkswagen and Porsche. VW is a brand that also appeals to an extremely broad target group in its communication. VW makes cars for old and young, for families and individualists, there's something for everyone. Accordingly, VW's overall communication is very broadly based. You find the opposite at Porsche. Porsche targets only one basic emotional type, and that is the one with a pronounced dominance system, i.e., a desire for career, power, status, and assertion. We call this type "performer. And it is precisely for this performer that Porsche builds its cars, the Boxter for the young performer and the Panamera or Cayenne for the old performer. And communication is focused accordingly.

How exactly do I need to know my customer to be able to influence his buying behavior?
I have to know who my target customer is, who I want to address. Then I can still decide whether I want to shoot a bullet or whether it's better to shoot buckshot, because my product is not particularly target group-oriented, as we've just seen with the Volkswagen example. In many areas, you have an extremely broad target group, but in areas like lifestyle, the target groups are much narrower. But I have to know that beforehand. I have to know what kind of gun I'm going to take out of my cabinet - do I get the shotgun or the rifle - but for that I have to know in advance who my target is.

How can you seduce customers? Where are the "buy buttons"?
If I know who my customer is and which emotional fields they are at home in, then I can align the language with that, I can base the imagery on that, I can base my advertising messages on that, I can align my social media activities with that - in other words, I stage my product in such a way that it fits exactly into this emotional funnel that belongs to their personality. That can be very pointed, as with Porsche, but it can also be the case that I take messages that many people like equally and that are not particularly target group-oriented. If you show a nice ideal world, everyone wants it. So you can control whether your message is emotionally relevant or not. But that's how you can influence probabilities, not predict certain outcomes.

And how can consumers prevent a button from being pushed on them?
To do this, you need to know how the providers shoot.

You have a very defensive vocabulary, you use "shoot", "gun", "perpetrator", "victim" - is marketing a struggle?
No, but we're in competition. And competition can be playful or a Champions League game. But that's also fun.

Does it depend on the product how well you can arouse desire for it? Does chocolate sell more easily than detergent?
Yes, of course, it always depends on whether the product has some kind of rewarding aspect or is part of a daily ritual. Detergent tends to be part of a daily ritual, chocolate is a reward. And if the product then goes into the distinction line, i.e. enables you to have status, then of course a lot more desire arises. Products often also have a social communication function; with the iPhone 7, for example, you demonstrate a penchant for individualism. But not all products have a social communication function: detergent has none at all, toilet paper none at all, chocolate some of the time, even the wine you serve your guests already has a social communication. And the more emotional worlds there are behind a product, the more the consumer is willing to pay money for it. Detergent triggers low reward, chocolate triggers medium reward.

What tips do you give to makers of detergent commercials - the most awful commercials of all - that are eerily annoying, especially on evening programming?
You are on the wrong track with this assessment. Because here you have to ask exactly: For whom? I assume that you are well educated as a journalist and are rather individualistic. For you, doing the laundry is probably also more of a punishment. So you don't belong to the group of people who are actually interested in laundry detergents. However, there is a group of consumers - especially female consumers - that should not be underestimated, who do not see washing as a punishment, but rather as part of their life fulfillment. That's about 35 percent of all women. They tend to be passive, conservative, we call them harmonizers. For them, of course, laundry detergent has a completely different meaning than it does for the two of us. That's why these commercials run in the evening program: That's where they all sit! In return, they won't see much detergent advertising in digital media. A second group, the traditionalists, are also responsive to detergent advertising.

What do "stinginess is cool" from Saturn and "I'm not stupid" from Media Markt do to the recipient's brain? Why does such advertising work?
Here, too, we need to see the coding of Saturn and Media Markt; which core target group are you addressing? The emotional core target group here is 70 percent men between the ages of 20 and 35. These are the ones with testosterone and dopamine, loud and aggressive, already a bit brutal, that's exactly the world that suits this target group and that the advertising is also aimed at. What is particularly exciting in the case of Media Markt is that Media Markt belongs to the Metro Group, which also owns the Real hypermarkets, which serve a completely different target group, more our harmonizers. And the Real stores put exactly the same polarity as Media Markt into their advertising a few years ago. The result was disastrous. Because the advertising did not hit the world of the target group. What works well at Media Markt, this testosterone-fueled advertising, doesn't work exactly there.

You advise medium-sized companies and corporations on marketing and sales. Can you give me an example of an assignment in which neuromarketing brought about a turnaround and finally resulted in entrepreneurial success?
I would like to tell you about a project that the Nymphenburg Group has undertaken together with the Vorarlberg company Zumtobel: Zumtobel is one of the largest and most high-profile lighting manufacturers in the world. We measured the emotional impact of light for Zumtobel, using neurophysiological means, i.e. we surveyed acceptance and rejection. This is how we found out that different emotional types have different light preferences. So if you are more in the harmony and balance zone, you look for a different lighting atmosphere than if you are hedonistic or performance-oriented. Together with a large German fashion chain, we then looked at which target groups you actually serve, which is the core target group, and then we aligned the light in the stores precisely to the core target group. The effect: ten percent more sales. (More about the study)

What can salespeople learn from brain research?
You can read about that in my book "Topseller". Perhaps a brief summary. What does the sales process look like from the perspective of brain research? The first topic would be how body language is created and what I can already do on the nonverbal level to trigger trust in the customer's brain. The second topic is how I find out what my customer really wants. There are magic questions that virtually ask the customer what he wants and with which you trigger the right actions at the same time. And the third topic is how I present my product arguments in such a way that I really trigger product desirability - in other words, what do the language and multisensory elements have to look like? And the fourth topic would be: What can I do to speed up the decision or move the customer toward the decision so that the sales conversation doesn't end up completely open-ended? Brain research can contribute quite a bit to this.

So in essence, it's about consciously dealing with the unconscious or subconscious.
Exactly, recognizing and sending out signals. These instruments have been used forever and brain research did not invent all this. But it can show and explain what works and what doesn't and why something works. We can use this to target advertising and sales. If you know that something works and why, you are simply better off than if you only suspect that it might work.

In which direction do you think marketing is developing in 2016?
Of course, you almost can't hear it anymore, digitization continues, that's one part. But our brain still remains the old one. I think we all have to be aware of the digital possibilities - but we also always have to ask ourselves in front of which and for which brain this is taking place. And only when we know how the brain reacts to digital media can we use these possibilities properly. Sure, all areas are becoming more and more digital, the media itself, retail, print is decreasing, online is increasing, digital commerce is outpacing retail - but still, everything has to be implemented in a brain-friendly way with the possibilities of the individual channels. That is the wish I would have in 2016, 2017 and 2018.

Interview: Anne-Friederike Heinrich

In a nutshell

Hans-Georg Häusel holds a doctorate in psychology and is a thought leader in neuromarketing. He is one of the leading international experts in marketing, sales and management brain research. As a brain researcher with many years of consulting experience, Häusel knows where the many small unconscious purchase buttons are located in customers, what distinguishes customers from one another and how to win them over. He shows managers how motivation and leadership really work from the brain's point of view and what makes companies successful. Häusel is a sought-after keynote speaker both nationally and internationally. He has received the Excellence Award as one of the best speakers in the German-speaking world. Together with the Haufe publishing group and the Nymphenburg Group, Häusel also organizes the largest European neuromarketing congress every year. Häusel is a lecturer at the Hochschule für Wirtschaft in Zurich and works as a senior partner for Gruppe Nymphenburg Consult.

Haeusel.com
 

This interview already appeared in the Werbewoche "Branchenreport Marketin", which was sent to our subscribers with Werbewoche 4/16.

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