NPneuro.pdf

NeuroMarketing: APeek Inside Your Mind?

Published in Marketing Section of the National Post August 18 th 2006

BY KYLE B. MURRAY

What drives people to buy a pet rock? Or a BMW? Or a $5 cup of coffee?

Marketers are interested in these questions, and theyhave come up with a number of

techniques for figuring out the answers. In many cases they simply ask the consumer.

Sometimes they observe the consumer in action and attempt to deduce the underlying

rationale. In other cases, carefully designed experiments can provide valuable

information about things such as which advertisements do people respond to or what kind

of store layout encourages buying. Nevertheless, market researchers continue to struggle

to better understand what buyers are thinking.

Recently, this has led to the emergence of neuromarketing – a set of techniques

that aim to look directly into consumers’ brains to see what is going on when buying

decisions are being made. Some early results have demonstrated interesting findings that

fuel continued exploration of the power and potentialofneuroscience applied to

marketing.

Take for example, one of this year’s more popular Superbowl commercials: the

FedEx Caveman. During the commercial a caveman’s attempts to send a package are

frustrated bythe realities of hominid life during the age of dinosaurs. His boss blames

him when the Pterodactyl carrying his message is eaten by a TRex. Angry, he storms out

of the cave and is promptly squashed by the foot of some kind of enormous lizard. At

this point, most people watching the ad laugh or giggle and, probably, forget what the ad

was about.

However, another interesting thing also happens, a small part of the viewer’s

brain that is known to respond to fearful and threatening stimuli (the amygdala) spikes

with substantially elevated levels of activity. The researchers at UCLA’s Ahmanson

Lovelace Brain Mapping Center, who have been studying the brain’s response to

Superbowl ads, believe that this spike indicates that the brain is threatened by the image.

From the outside, the response to the ad is one of humor and enjoyment, inside the brain

the response appears to be one of fear. By directly observing this type of neuralactivity

some researchers believe that they gain valuable insights that allow them to predict

consumers’ preferences.

For example, Read Montague, Director of the Human Neuroimaging Labat the

Baylor College of Medicine, has demonstrated that many consumers’ brains really do

prefer Coke to Pepsi. Interestingly, and consistent withwhat Pepsi has been telling us for

years, Montague found that in a blind taste test Pepsi is preferred to Coke. However, he

went further and also conducted the test while scanning the brain activity of a group of

participants while they took the “Pepsi Challenge.” What he found was that Pepsi

produced a stronger response in the ventral putamen, an area of the brain that is believed

to process feelings of reward. However, when Montague told his subjects what they were

drinking he found the preference reversed and most people said they liked Coke more

than Pepsi. And, they weren’t just saying it. Their brains actually reacted differently

when they knew they were drinking Coke. In addition to elevated activity in the ventral

putamen, subjects’ brains were active in areas that are involved in memories, selfimage

and action control. It appearsthat memories and other impressions of the drink – what

marketers would call brand associations – were affecting the consumers’ evaluation of

the taste. As with the FedEx commercial, the brain scans provided information that the

people themselves were unaware of, but marketers are likely to find useful. Montague

took it a step further and demonstrated that he could predict, based on their brain images

alone, who would prefer Coke and who would chose Pepsi.

Other studies, examining political marketing in the United States, found that

voters’ brains have a strong positive emotionalreactionto the party that they affiliate

themselves with. Moreover, Democrats have a strong reaction in their amygdala

(indicative offear and/or threat) when watching president Bush, while Republicans do

not. Interestingly, a study conducted at Emory University, found that when responding to

political messages the part of the brain associated with reasoning (the dorsolateral

prefrontal cortex) was passive. All of the action was occurring in areas associated with

emotion (orbital frontal cortex), conflict resolution (anterior cingulated) and moral

judgments (posterior cingulated). Moreover, it also appeared that once people arrived at

a conclusion, activity increased inthe ventral striatum, which is an area associated with

reward and pleasure.

While some researchers have argued that these sorts of results empower buyers by

making them aware of how they can be influenced, opponents see the application of

neuroscience to the practice of marketing as a disturbing development that requires

oversight and regulation to protect consumers. Opponents are especially troubled by the

fact that this approach can often provide researchers with insights into consumer behavior

that consumers themselves don’t have access to (because brain imaging provides

information about neural activity that is not necessarily consciously available to the

person being scanned – i.e., the brain activity being imaged is often occurring at a non

conscious level). Yet another group of researchers do not believe that this type of

technology will provide us with any truly new insights – for example, is it shocking to

learn that Democrats react negatively to president Bush?

Nevertheless, there is growing interest surrounding these techniques. The allure

of a better understanding ofconsumer decision making is powerful. As a result,

corporations are likely to continue to make use of tools ranging fromtraditional

consumer surveys to brain imaging studies. Emerging techniques, such as genetic

profiling, are also likely to play a role in the marketing plans of the future for drug

companies, food manufacturers and others. Neuromarketing is in its infancy, and if

consumers and society want to play a role in how such technologies are developed and

applied, they should make it a priority to learn more – acting sooner rather than later.

Kyle B. Murray is an Assistant Professor of Marketing and theDirector of the Behavioral

Research Lab at the Richard Ivey School of Business at the University of Western

Ontario.

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