8. February 2010

1 Comment

Post-Super Bowl Briefing

Very soon, we will be subjected to a variety of neuromarketing-based opinions on which Super Bowl 2010 ads worked, and which didn’t. While we are awaiting these analyses, I thought I’d point readers at a good article on one kind of neuromarketing study methodology by WIRED writer Alexis Madrigal. It’s accurate, largely devoid [...]

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2. February 2010

4 Comments

Neuromarketing Foes Use Subliminal Text?

Neuromarketing Foes Use Subliminal Text?

Yesterday I wrote about the latest anti-neuromarketing flap in Guard Your Reptilian Brain! While researching that post, I found an interesting spinoff at another site, Progressives, South Bend. I initially couldn’t find the text “neuromarketing” on that page. When I searched the page text, I found what looked like a short horizontal [...]

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1. February 2010

9 Comments

Guard Your Reptilian Brain!

Guard Your Reptilian Brain!

Every year or so, some fuzzy-thinking critic reads an article about neuromarketing, becomes extremely agitated, and tries to raise the alarm about marketers turning consumers into mind-controlled zombies. The latest push of the neuro-panic button began with an article on a site called Truthout (fresh out of truth, perhaps?). Truthout seems to be a [...]

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29. January 2010

4 Comments

WIRED Throwing Biometric Super Bowl Party

WIRED Throwing Biometric Super Bowl Party

Every year, there is a burst of neuromarketing-related activity coinciding with the Super Bowl. After all, that game features commercials that people actually watch, and the cost of airing each ad is the highest of any program throughout the entire year. One staple of Super Bowl Sunday is the party – millions will [...]

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26. January 2010

11 Comments

Neuromanagement: The Rule of Three?

Neuromanagement: The Rule of Three?

Trivia question: Why were local phone numbers originally seven digits long? The answer is that in the early days of local phone service, researchers found that seven digit numbers were about as long as most people could remember without forgetting or making errors. (One oft-quoted study on the “seven” topic is The Magical [...]

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21. January 2010

14 Comments

Your Brain on Stories

Your Brain on Stories

“They laughed when I sat down at the piano…”
“On a beautiful late spring afternoon, twenty-five years ago, two young men graduated from the same college. They were very much alike, these two young men. Both had been better than average students…”

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20. January 2010

6 Comments

Start Me Up: Brilliant Billboard

Billboards can be an effective medium, but tend to be very low in viewer engagement. Most outdoor advertising is designed to be viewed in a second or less as motorists whiz by. Here’s an example of how one advertiser turned that idea upside-down to create a fully interactive billboard:

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19. January 2010

2 Comments

Green Marketing: Light Up Sales

Green Marketing: Light Up Sales

“Green marketing” usually refers to using an environmental pitch to sell a product. A car creates less pollution, a paper product is made from recycled content, and so on. Results of appealing to environmental sentiment have been mixed. On one hand, the Toyota Prius has sold better than would be justified purely [...]

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15. January 2010

2 Comments

Food, Shelter, and Big Words

Food, Shelter, and Big Words

Decades ago, Abraham Maslow proposed that humans had a hierarchy of needs, with food being at the most basic level of biological need and shelter one step above as part of a “safety” need. He may have been on the right track, according to new research led by Marcel Just at Carnegie Mellon University. [...]

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7. January 2010

6 Comments

Pricing Lessons from Restaurants

My last Neuromarketing post, Neuro-Menus and Restaurant Psychology, talked about various things restaurant menu engineers do to maximize sales and profits. I think it’s worth calling special attention to one aspect touched on in that post: how price presentation affects sales. Not, the price itself, which of course is very important, but the [...]

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