As managing director of the North American office of Proximity ShopWork, the shopping division for global ad agency BBDO, Laura Davis-Taylor is one of the retail industry’s most influential marketing strategists.
And what she does for her retail clients is highly applicable to trade-show floors — which, as she sees it, face the same sell- ing challenges as stores. “I classify them both as ‘distracted environments,’” Davis-
Taylor said. “Super busy, super cluttered. Lots going on. They can be very, very, very loud.” And they both face the same uphill battle: getting and keeping the attention of buyers in environments saturated with competing messages. Amid all the noise, Davis-Taylor said, “everybody wants uniqueness
— something that makes you stand apart and helps you get beyond the sea of sameness.” Her advice for companies and organizations when it
comes to designing a trade-show booth? “I wouldn’t think of it as designing a trade-show booth at all,” she said. “I would think of it as designing an experience. Brands have to break through competition. And that’s not just visually. You can break through visually and get nowhere. You’ve got to break through visually and emotionally.” Creating an experience for attendees — one that resonates
emotionally — is key to being memorable. “Getting inside,” Davis-Taylor said, “that’s what’s going to matter. When you create the right experience, you create the right emotions. And you get people to buy in and open their minds and be part of something.”
SENSING THE SALE The idea that emotion is key to selling isn’t new, of course. Advertising that relies on subtle and not-so-subtle sugges- tions that buying certain products will make us happier, sexier, and more successful has surrounded us for decades, in increasing numbers. (The average resident of a city will encounter 3,000 to 4,000 advertising messages in a single day, according to Davis-Taylor.) What is relatively new, however, are brain-imaging tech- niques like functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI),
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which measures patterns of electrical activity in the brain and maps their locations. The technology can pinpoint the regions of the brain that are activated by advertising mes- sages, yielding information about whether specific marketing messages are triggering rational or emotional reactions, or combinations of both, and how effective they are at doing so. These tools offer what amounts to the ability to interview
our brains, brand expert Martin Lindstrom writes in his best- selling book Buyology: Truth and Lies About What We Buy. By accessing our brains in the “nanosecond lapse before think- ing is translated into words,” brain-imaging techniques can tell us “the naked truth … unplugged and uncensored, about what causes us to buy,” writes Lindstrom, whose work has given him a seminal voice in neuromarketing, as the field of neuroscience-backed marketing is called. In Buyology, Lindstrom relates the breakthrough results
of a 2003 experiment that used brain imaging to analyze the reactions of research subjects participating in a version of the famous Pepsi Challenge, where Pepsi and Coca-Cola went head-to-head in blind taste tests. When test subjects tasted the soft drinks without knowing which was Coke and which was Pepsi, more than half said they preferred Pepsi, a response that was backed up by the measurement of activity in the part of the brain that is active when we find tastes appealing. But when test subjects knew which soft drinks they tasted beforehand, more than 75 percent said they preferred Coke. Brain activity also shifted, according to Lindstrom, showing that the test subjects’ brains were engaged in a “mute tug-of-war between rational and emo- tional thinking.” Despite the rational preference for Pepsi, Coke won out
because of all the positive associations the tasters had devel- oped with Coca-Cola over the years — the “sheer, inarguable, inexorable, ineluctable, emotional Coke-ness of the brand,” Lindstrom writes. Because emotions are the way in which our