The following text is from an interview with Martin Lindstrom for the book ‘Defining Sponsorship‘. Martin is a ‘brand futurist’, the CEO and Chairman of LINDSTROM company, and Chairman of BUYOLOGY INC, advising companies including Nokia and McDonald’s. His brand-building shows attract 800,000 people across the world. He has written many books, including ‘Buyology‘.
‘The vast majority of sponsorship doesn’t work because it is aimed at the conscious part of the brain, which neuroscience tells us, accounts for no more than 15% of our cognitive capacity. We are bombarded with thousands of direct market- ing messages a day, very few of which we are able to take in, let alone process into changing buying behaviour.
The communications industry spends its time measuring awareness and hoping that some value transfer takes place, something we have never been able to prove. Now we can, and I’m convinced that we will see the sponsorship model change dramatically as a result.
Marketing people must realise it is not about plastering your logo everywhere, it is about context, and about embedding the message within the narrative of the story being told, whether that is a football match or a James Bond movie. Our research into this is extensive, and it tells us that when a brand appears in a story at the wrong moment, we don’t just ignore it, we delete it from our mind, such is our irritation at being interrupted. Having a logo on the perimeter board is not worth the money. Likewise, rights-holders must prove they are about more than just awareness, which is not so valuable as it was 20 years ago, when the sponsorship model was built that still applies today.
There are so many poor marketing people out there who must now ask themselves, do we have an emotional strategy? Do we have a subconscious strategy? What kind of indirect signals do we want to send?
I’m very impressed by Marlboro’s ability to take the core values of Formula One – sex, speed, innovation, coolness – and apply them to a cigarette brand. An amazing achievement. On a personal level I hate it, but professionally there is much to recommend.
We carried out experiments just showing a Formula One car, and people immediately craved cigarettes. What Marlboro have done is create a huge number of what I call submergible 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.
Sponsorship works when we are not really aware of the signals 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 logos around, my rational mind tells me I shouldn’t crave those things. Without the logo my instinct kicks in and I want to smoke. The evidence is mounting that the most powerful form of sponsorship today is where you do not have a logo but you make up for this with submergible components of the brand.’
