Neuromarketing: controlling peoples minds?

05/04/2014

Special accessories that can gather specific brain waves and tell us how people’s minds react to certain things have been amongst us for decades but new technology can now tell us more precisely which certain parts of the brain activate as people have to buy products, make certain brand choices or have to watch advertisements. Today, every neuroscientist’s dream of being able to have a look into the brain while it’s active has become possible! Rita Carter, a science writer, uses a perfect quote to describe this new achievement: “Brain-scan machines are opening up the territory of the mind, the same way the first ocean-going ships once opened up the globe.” Neuromarketing is the application of neuroscience into marketing to improve the ways of selling products. The application of brain-scan technology to marketing, especially the use of fMRI, a new device that captures images of the brain while it processes information, gave importance to this event. Ale Smidts, professor of marketing research, is who have gave the name to this new application in 2002 and Gerry Zaltman, professor at Harvard, is the first marketing specialist to introduce fMRI as a marketing technique. However, the idea of neuromarketing has been around for about forty years, even if no one had given a name to it until today. Neuromarketing is an improvement on the way that scientists a look inside people’s heads with devices. In the late 1960’s people were already using pupilometers, devices that measure how the pupil dilates to indicate peoples’ interest while looking at print advertisements. At the same time in marketing people were playing with GSR, a device that measures the skin’s reaction, as a possible but much less precise indicator of people’s mental response to advertisements and products. Later, we developed new technology for eye tracking, which revealed exactly where on the advertisement people’s eyes were focusing on. In the 1970’s Herbert Krugman and Flemming Hansen, two scientists, began to explore left and right brain processes using an EEG, a brain wave detector which at the time was the most advanced technology.

Each of these technologies was described at the time as a new and futuristic method to achieve this goal, thinking that they were pretty close to actually achieve it. But later none of them found actual use in marketing although some like eye tracking could keep giving important information for other uses. The first encounter s with these technologies introduced into marketing were at Coca-Cola in the late 1960’s when people used the pupilometer to see what it could say about differences in interest and attention to alternative advertising executions. The answer was that asking the actual customers was easier and gave better results. Then in 1981, people came across brain wave monitoring using SST. Professor Richard Silberstein at Swinburne University was using SST in pure and clinical applications and was investigating its possible use in marketing. It was very impressive, even though the technology clearly had a long way to go. Today, thirty three years later, scientists are convinced that SST can provide interesting information in marketing with the benefit of years of accumulated experience in interpreting SST brain wave activity.

The newer technologies, fMRI and MEG are the latest developments in brain-scan technologies. Their potential to impress clients has made it attractive to incorporate their use into marketing. But while their potential is undoubtedly exciting, published studies about introducing them into marketing remain quite scarce. No more than two dozen studies have been reported in the press and barely a handful of these have published any real details in peer reviewed journals. One of the earliest studies using the newer technology was by Ambler and his colleagues at the London Business School. It asked people while they were in a MEG scanner which of three brands they would purchase and found that familiar brands stimulate a specific part of the brain. The authors pointed to this area as the possible ‘location of brand decision’. In 2000, Rossiter used SST to monitor brain waves while people watched TV ads and they were able to predict what scenes people would recognize a week later. They found they could predict this from activity in the left brain at the time of exposure. Until then it was thought that the crucial processing for pictures would be in the right hemisphere.