World Markets Simplified

Ever since Kareena Kapoor featured in her bright pink saree and dark blue blouse in her item song 'Halkat Jawaani' in Madhur Bhandarkar’s upcoming film, her costume became the talk of town. And now buzz is that the same ensemble is being auctioned for a cause.

Our source says, "The money will be donated to a charitable organisation, which Kareena is associated to." There is also news that the Manish Malhotra-designed costume managed to create quite a buzz at the recently concluded Mumbai fashion week.

We all like to think we make buying decisions on a rational level, but neuroscientists tell us otherwise. While marketers have known this instinctively, brain mappers have shown that the smallest part of the brain, the amygdala, lights up like a Christmas tree when confronted with fight-or-flight or in this case buy-or-fly situations.

Recently, I visited with Christophe Morin, a French researcher with SalesBrain, which is based in San Francisco and claims to be the world's first neuromarketing agency. His title is chief pain officer. He believes that if a company wants someone to buy its products or services, it must seduce the reptilian brain — the part that controls fear and other emotions.

"Pain" is in his title because his company's approach is to help marketers look at the frustrations and challenges consumers experience. "Humans are pain-avoiding machines," Mr. Morin said. "Sometimes our pain points are conscious and sometimes unconscious."

Six Rules for Small Business
He offered six simple rules that small businesses can follow:

1. Don't use the word "we" or start off your pitch with a corporate overview that lasts 10 minutes. Focus instead on how to relieve your customers' pain. Our brains are extremely self-centered, and we care most about our own survival.

2. About 10,000 messages are sent to our brains daily, so get to the point. "When you sell to the lower brain structure, you must say, 'This is your life with our product or service, this is your life without,'" Mr. Morin said. He cited a successful campaign that helped a client that was selling home flood remediation services to major insurance companies. The campaign featured a traveling exhibit that showed a flooded home and how the company had mastered the art of drying home interiors. "The reptilian brain gets very stimulated by this kind of disruption. Stay away from, "We are one of the leading providers." It's the marketing equivalent of sugar -- empty calories.

3. Make your points visual. Remember the "See and Say" books from childhood? Don't just tell; show. "We are visual people, and the eyes are directly connected to the reptilian brain," he said.

4. Stay concrete and make it tangible. The primal brain isn't able to understand complex language or metaphors. As much as we love word play, if it's too complicated, it doesn't get processed by the parts of us that make decisions. Creating ads with facial expressions is good. "Facial expressions help us decode what people's intentions are," he said.

5. Gain attention quickly in your advertising or marketing and make sure you have a strong close. The brain pays the most attention at the beginning and end of an event. It's important because the brain needs to recap and store.

6. Use emotion. It creates disruption, a contrast with what we expect — surprise, laughter, fear, disgust, anger, it really doesn't matter. If there is emotion, we are more likely to remember the message. Nothing happens in the brain unless some chemical process has found a code to create memories. To create a memorable brand, therefore, you have to use emotional connectors in your advertising. Don't just give your audience the facts, tell them how it will make their lives better and solve their pain.

All in all, Mr. Morin believes that if your target market has to kick your advertising up to their cortex, its not going to be as effective. At our advertising agency, we always encourage clients to let us create advertising that makes that critical emotional connection. Mr. Morin's comments also made me reflect on infomercials. While often considered the bottom feeders of the marketing food chain, infomercials can be effective because they follow these rules: show contrast, keep it simple and be visual.

In May, the Corporate Executive Board, shared research that suggested that brands that help consumers simplify the decision process have customers who are far more likely to purchase their products and recommend them to others. It is a fascinating study that is featured in the Harvard Business Review and states that many businesses are pushing customers away by bombarding them with messaging that is not relevant to how they make decisions.

There has also been much discussion lately about the rewiring that is happening to our brains because of our constant interaction with computers and smartphones. This interaction is further reducing our attention spans, which is pushing overworked and overcommitted American consumers to make purchasing and other decisions more quickly. The upshot is that people want information but they want it baby style — pureed to its most basic and served simply.

Something to wrap your marketing brain around.

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In Wisconsin, Apple Scores An Early Victory Against Motorola

A recent summary judgement in the Wisconsin chapter of Apple vs. Motorola could set a precedent for patent disputes across the country. On Friday, before Google announced its decision to cut 4,000 jobs at the phone maker, the judge in Wisconsin ruled in a summary judgement that Motorola cannot sue to stop the sale of Apple's patent-flouting devices. Rather, the technology in question ought to be licensable to folks like Apple and Microsoft under fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory, otherwise known as FRAND, terms. Holding Motorola to FRAND terms would also cut down the price that Apple has to pay to license those patents. As Foss Patent explains, this could have an impact on FRAND-related disputes in other places, including the California chapter of Apple vs. Samsung.

Klout Gets An Algorithm And Interface Overhaul

Klout, that score-keeper of online activity, has announced changes to the way it calculates and displays scores and rankings. For one, it will take into account 4 times as many signals, AllThingsD explains, picking up 400 cues like list memberships and Facebook subscriptions before assigning a person a score. Klout's controvertial assigned scores and areas of "influence" have sometimes baffled users in the past, but Klout hopes to make their workings a little more transparent in this update. For one, Klout will indicate in a user's timeline when their influenc-o-meter spikes.

Google+ Joins The Vanity URL Game

Google's revealed that its social network system Google+ is going to allow users to adopt vanity URLs. The move will start with verified people and pages that are mainly celebrities or brands, and then eventually roll out to more users. Currently Google+ user pages are identified by a long string of numbers as an identifier, which is practical but hardly memorable.

Google is following a trail blazed by its more established rivals Twitter and Facebook, which have already adopted a more text-based identifier--Facebook more recently. The use of a simpler user ID allows both brands and named users to stand out a little and may also facilitate discovery of new users and content.

Google's blog posting about the news notes that it will expand to include "many more" users, but doesn't conclusively say that all of the users of the service will be able to choose a short, memorable URL.

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Standard Chartered reaches settlement with N.Y. state

Computers and personal items worth more than $60,000 have been stolen from the Northern California home of the late Steve Jobs.

The San Jose Mercury News reports 35-year-old Kariem McFarlin, of Alameda, has been arrested and charged with residential burglary and selling stolen property. He remains jailed with bail set at $500,000 pending an Aug. 20 court hearing.

Santa Clara County prosecutor Tom Flattery won't say if the items taken from the Palo Alto home on July 17 belonged to Jobs or another family member. The house was surrounded by a temporary construction barrier in July.

Kariem McFarlin, of Alameda, has been arrested and charged with residential burglary.

The co-founder of Apple died last year at the age of 56.

Flattery refused to discuss details about the case.

The prosecutor says McFarlin was likely unaware of the home's significance. But does it really matter? Because if we see the History, it is not the first time for Steve Jobs to get cheated.

( AP )

Music label Sa Re Ga Ma is now strengthening its digital division. They have bought the digital rights to Canada-based Indian adult actor-turned-Bollywood star Sunny Leone’s private content.

Confirming the news, R Madhusudan, vice president digital of Sa Re Ga Ma, says, “She is a celebrity  and has a lot of images and videos. We have bought the licenses for these. The huge demand for celebrity imagery prompted us to do this.”

The content comprises Leone’s pictures, photos, videos and trivia, which will be available on the Internet and mobile apps.

“It’s available on the web and mobile services like Airtel, Docomo and Reliance. The download is free, but one has to pay a daily or weekly subscription fee,” he says.

Ask how he plans to promote the product, and he says, “We ran a contest and a lot of people have participated. We will pick a couple of lucky winners who will have the opportunity to meet Sunny,” says Madhusudan.

He is clear that the content won’t include her films or any of the work that she did for other channels. “This is not content from any film that she has acted in. We haven’t purchased the rights to all her films; she herself doesn’t have rights to those. Apart from acting in films, she has also shot a few videos,” says Madhusudan, adding, “The contract is for a certain period of time. There are some contractual compulsions under which I won’t be able to reveal the actual duration,” he says.

( Hindustan Times )

Huffpost Kicks Off Live Stream, Live Comment Effort

Today the Huffington Post launched a new video system that combines live broadcast programming alongside an interface that promotes discussion about the live content in real time. The company is going to stream 12 hours of content a day, five days a week and is an attempt at making the most social video experience possible, according to founding editor of the publication Roy Sekoff. Programs can be watched after they've been shown live.

Social media discussion of live video content is a hot topic, with the London Olympics serving as a giant example of how social media is being used in real time during the broadcast of events. An early awareness of the potential of driving up audience engagement using social media was demonstrated when Fox attempted a live tweet stream during a re-run of sci-fi show Fringe, which unfortunately flopped.

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