Philips brand values match adult products?

My first thoughts when I read in ‘Marketing’ thproducts, at Philips are to market adult products, was one of slight disquiet. Okay we are only talking ‘personal massager’ (for that read vibrator) and I guess many similar products designed to relieve muscle stress etc. have been turned to alternative applications. However, it suddenly threw another new ingredient into Philips’s brand value stew. My second thought was to remind myself that Philips is a Dutch company. Adult products are perhaps less likely to affect the flavour of their Dutch ‘gestoofd’ as they will of their English brand value stew.

This is perhaps a bit of brand trivia, but it raises the question about whether brand actions that we take based upon our own cultural values and mores may have subtly different different impacts in other cultures?

Neuroeconomics and brand decisions

Neuroeconomics looks at the cognitive processes involved in economic decision making and often makes use of such imaging techniques as fMRI and PET scans of the brain. It is yet another tool to understanding behaviour, particularly the irrational behaviour that often drives market decisions. As such, many have suggested that it could be a useful tool in understanding brand interactions and selection decisions.

Any tools which add to our understanding are useful… but this raises a couple of issues as to whether it is asking the right questions. For known brands, we have two kinds of processing involved – high involvement processing  (HIP), dealing with the declarative knowledge we have about a brand and low involvement processing (LIP) which has to do with our emotional connection with the brand values and our meta-knowledge of what the brand stands for. Both of these may be happening simultaneously. How do we separate the data… indeed should we? And which questions are being answered?

As in economics we may often make irrational brand decisions, then persuade ourselves in hindsight of their rationality.