Archive | November, 2006

Brain Branding Story Grows Legs

29. November 2006

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When we wrote Brain Branding post yesterday, most of the mainstream press hadn’t picked up on the unassuming press release from the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA). What a difference a day makes – Google News counted nearly forty related articles by this morning, including:
BBC News: Well-known brands set our brainwaves buzzing, [...]

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Brain Branding: The Power of Strong Brands

28. November 2006

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How important is a strong brand image? A new study presented at the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) shows that people presented with known brand images processed them in areas of the brain associated with positive emotions, while unfamiliar brands took more effort for the brain to process and activated areas of the [...]

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Thinking About Money

27. November 2006

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Earlier this year, we wrote Priming the Customer, which briefly covered some fascinating research in the area of priming. The concept of priming is simple, although it’s also a bit startling: by presenting an individual with subtle cues, one can affect subsequent behavior of that individual, entirely without conscious awareness of either the priming [...]

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DARPA Driving Neuroscience Research

22. November 2006

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Those who are fans of commercial technologies spinning off from military or government research will be happy to know that the field of neuroscience is getting plenty of attention and government funding. The Australian has published an article by biomedical ethicist Jonathan Moreno of the University of Virginia, Mind out for the new battlefield. [...]

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The Thinking Amygdala

19. November 2006

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A recurring theme in quite a few of our neuromarketing posts is the apparent contest between the amygdala, a brain structure long thought to be the seat of emotions in the brain, and other brain structures thought to be responsible for higher cognitive functions like reasoning and problem solving. Now, neuroscientists at Yale University have [...]

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Avoiding Fairness Dissonance

10. November 2006

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Most of us attempt to treat each other fairly, and react negatively if we feel we are treated unfairly. We may even react negatively if we see someone else being treated in an unfair manner. Research shows that this sense of fairness isn’t something we learn in school or from our parents (though [...]

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Mindless Eating

9. November 2006

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A recurring theme in our neuromarketing posts is that our subconscious mind evaluates situations, makes decisions, and in general does its own thing without our conscious awareness. Our rational, thinking, analytical brain – the thing that separates us from other species – is blissfully unaware of most of this activity. A new book, [...]

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Pricing, Ego, and Emotion

6. November 2006

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Neuromarketing and Pricing. Why do people sometimes set prices that are too high, and then stubbornly stick with them despite evidence from the marketplace that the price is indeed wrong? Neuroeconomics research tells us that financial decisions are often evaluated in a way that lets our emotions overrule rational financial analysis, and setting [...]

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Neuroeconomics Loses to Crackberry

3. November 2006

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Neuroeconomics finished a respectable runner-up in the 2006 Word of the Year contest run by staffers at Webster’s New World College Dictionary. Crackberry, a term that reflects the addicitive nature of PDA-based messaging and e-mail, is used to refer to both the PDAs and their users. The press release listed two other runner-up [...]

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