Forbes: Beyond the Brand

"Make it bigger," the executive suggested as I scrambled to sign off on an ad on behalf of a major fashion brand. I wasn't the slightest bit surprised. For as long as I can remember, the size and placement of a product's logo has been the holiest grail of branding.

But considering that by retirement age the average American has watched roughly 2 million TV commercials (and no doubt been exposed to an equivalent number of billboard ads), has the logo overstayed its welcome? In a multimillion-dollar global neuro-marketing study dubbed Project Buyology, I decided to peer inside consumers' brains to find out.Over the years I've been perplexed by the fact that despite worldwide tobacco-advertising bans and astronomical government investment in anti-smoking initiatives, global consumers continue to inhale 5,765 billion cigarettes a year--and that's not even including the huge duty-free or international black market trades.

The World Bank projects that the number of tobacco users is only going to shoot up further--from a current level of 1.4 billion smokers to roughly 1.6 billion by 2025. Four-year-old kids know about the health dangers of smoking; so why, pray tell, do brands like Marlboro and Camel still rank as among the most powerful in the world?

If experts generally agree that 85% of everything we do takes place in our subconscious minds, it seemed only fitting to target the human brain. Project Buyology, the largest project of its kind, enlisted roughly 2,000 volunteers worldwide, who agreed to submit themselves to functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), a type of brain scan, while viewing various cigarette-marketing related imagery. Over the years, I've turned down numerous entreaties from tobacco companies to work for their cause (if you want to call killing people a cause). For ethical reasons, I've always said no. But that hasn't kept me from distantly--and, admittedly, perversely--admiring these companies' tricks and strategies.

My question was this: Can the desire to smoke be triggered by images merely associated with a brand: images of a camel, a windswept desert, a rugged-looking cowboy or Marlboro's well-known sponsorship of the European Formula One racing circuit, which has forged an inextricable link between smoking and the company's bright red Ferraris? Do smokers even need to process the logos "Marlboro" or "Camel" for the craving spots in their brains to become activated?