Unit 5 Assignment

Neuromarketing

Sara LeDuc

Kaplan University

MT 359-01
Professor Tustin
November 18, 2013

It’s easy for businesses to keep track of what we buy, but harder to figure out why. Enter an emerging field called neuromarketing, which uses the tools of neuroscience to determine why we prefer some products over others. “People are fairly good at expressing what they want, what they like, or even how much they will pay for an item,” says Uma R. Karmarkar, an assistant professor at Harvard Business School. “But they aren’t very good at accessing where that value comes from, or how and when it is influenced by factors like store displays or brands. [Neuroscience] can help us understand those hidden elements of the decision process” (2013). According to Adam Penenberg, consumers do not just like certain products, “they're preprogrammed to like them. It's in their subconscious” (n.d.). In Mr. Penenberg’s article he discusses how science-based companies exist in the marketing community that have begun to utilize tools with the technology capable of “tapping into your brain” (n.d.). He goes on to explain about the world’s first portable, wireless electroencephalogram scanner, Mynd. “This skullcap-size device sports dozens of sensors that rest on a subject’s head like a crown of thorns” (Penenberg, n.d.) The purpose of this device it to capture, amplify, and instantaneously dispatch a subject’s bran waves in real time - via Bluetooth - to another device. The information gathered is then used to analyze the participant’s deep subconscious response to the commercials, products, brands, and messages of its clients. This way they can determine which products and brands are the most appealing to the consumers on many different levels giving them the competitive advantage against their competitors.
Mr. Nick Carr discusses in his