The Good Brand

3. Brands will be hard-wired in our brains.

Neuroscience has now confirmed what we had suspected all along: If you like Coke over Pepsi, it's all in your head. For that branding breakthrough, we can thank Read Montague, a neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine, who cooked up an experiment to keep his teenage daughter occupied as she helped out in his lab last summer. Montague wired up a group of volunteers and re-created the Pepsi challenge while monitoring their brain activity on an MRI. The results were astonishing. In blind taste tests, subjects' brains indicated a clear preference for Pepsi. But when they were told which of the samples was which, their brains switched brands. "The brand image of Coke in the nervous systems of the people we tested engaged systems in charge of cognitive control and commandeered their behavior," Montague says. In short, the power of the Coke brand was enough to override an objective preference.

A commercial application of the kind of work Montague is doing is already in play at BrightHouse, an Atlanta consulting firm. It offers clients the services of its Neurostrategies Group, a team that "uses neuroscience to influence higher-order strategic business decisions," such as identifying which brand benefits might prompt a consumer to buy. The company, which has done work for such clients as Home Depot, Pepperidge Farm, and Kmart, maintains that its projects are designed to give companies a better perspective on how people develop relationships with products, brands, and companies, not to help them design products or test ad campaigns. But scientists at BrightHouse recently identified the region of the brain that responds to products that most resonate with a consumer's self-image -- the space that lights up, for example, if a Chevy guy is shown a picture of a Silverado Half-Ton Crew. Montague thinks it's only a matter of time before neuromarketing finds a way to commercialize that discovery. Imagine, he says, a neural focus group where brand managers could test messages to see if they resonated with a target audience. "Bringing a new product to market is a huge risk for a company," he says. "If nothing else, this would add another quantitative data point to what you know about your demographic."

4.The line between entertainment and brands will blur.

When Beverly Hills hairstylist Jonathan Antin, the diva of Bravo's latest hit show, Blow Out, flicks his AmEx card to make business happen, are we watching entertainment or advertising? The reality-TV show is one of the more exotic hybrids of a hot subspecies of branding dubbed "advertainment." Alarmed by the defection of viewers from network TV, particularly those 18- to 34-year-olds who comprise advertising's demographic sweet spot, marketers are seeking ever more creative ways to connect. American Express's chief marketing officer, John Hayes, has been at the forefront of the trend, experimenting with an array of new approaches, including "Web-isodes" featuring Jerry Seinfeld, Superman, and an AmEx card; art exhibits with photographer Annie Liebowitz; a concert with Sheryl Crow; and club events in which the L.A. House of Blues morphed into the "House of Blue" for AmEx's Blue card. The company also sponsored last year's reality-TV show The Restaurant on NBC, and has favored-brand status on Blow Out. The implications for network TV loom large. In 1994, AmEx spent 80% of its marketing budget on TV; by 2003, that number had fallen to 35%. The change, Hayes says, was driven by the defection of audiences to other outlets -- DVDs, the Web, cable, video games -- and technologies, such as TiVo, that let viewers skip commercials. "We need to be where people are and involved in things they value," Hayes says. But, as with any new venture, he concedes there are still a few kinks to be worked out. AmEx's presence on The Restaurant was, he admits, occasionally ham-handed, as chef Rocco paused, midcrisis, to extol the virtues of the company's small-business service. That's a gaffe he hopes to avoid in Blow Out. "The critical part is finding the fine line between entertainment that can have commerce within it and feeling like it's too much of an intrusion," he says. "That's the art."