Monthly Archives

July 2007

Does Your Marketing Smell?

What does your marketing program smell like? If you have difficulty answering that question, you need to get up to speed on the powerful impact that's possible by activating your customers' olfactory nerves. (Web-only marketers won't have…

Better Brain Scans

Despite the pretty pictures generated by today's fMRI machines, they are lacking in both spatial and temporal resolution. Siemens is addressing this issue by commercializing a new kind of scanner technology that uses an array of sensors to…

Marketing and the Placebo Effect

We all know what the placebo effect is - give a group of patients a sugar pill instead of a medication with active ingredients, and some of them will show an improvement in their symptoms. Drug researchers treat the placebo effect as an…

How Customers Think

"About 95% of all thought, emotion, and learning occur in the unconscious mind - that is, without our conscious awareness." -Gerald Zaltman, in How Customers Think This is a basic premise of almost everything we write about here at…

Can Moving Images Improve Ad Recall?

Side-to-side eye movements have been shown to improve memory, according to researchers in the UK and the US. They speculate that the eye movement causes the two hemispheres of the brain to interact with each other more, but a mechanism…

High Testosterone Marketing

How does marketing to high-testosterone males differ from pitching their lower testosterone counterparts? And who are those testosterone-rich individuals? Recent neuroeconomics research gives us some clues. As reported in the New…

Why We Buy

Why We Buy - The Science of Shopping, by Paco Underhill, isn't exactly what the title might imply. It's not a neuromarketing text, it doesn't delve deep into the psyches of consumers, and it doesn't disclose the hidden motivations of…

Sensory Branding

Continuing our survey of neuromarketing books, we recently finished Brand Sense - Build Powerful Brands through Touch, Taste, Smell, Sight, and Sound, by Martin Lindstrom. This data-packed volume was published in 2005, and is based in…

Emotional Branding

Emotional Branding - The New Paradigm for Connecting Brands to People by Marc Gobé isn't a new book - it dates back to 2001. Nevertheless, those interested in neuromarketing or in gearing marketing efforts to work at the subconscious level…