September 2007

A few weeks ago, WIRED published an interesting story on the massive amount of testing that has gone into producing Halo 3. The biggest part of this has been usability testing to ensure that the game is continuously playable. By eliminating…

Earlier this month, Brandweek’s Jim Edwards put together a nice survey of the various ways companies are trying to get into consumers’ minds. He spends little time on well-publicized fMRI brain scan efforts, and the discussion of other…

The company cited by Brand Sense author Martin Lindstrom for doing the best job of sensory branding is Singapore Airlines. Now, Korean Air seems to be making its own major effort to appeal to multiple senses... via the primarily visual…

Logic tells us that a bigger problem should get more attention. One person suffering from a disease is certainly bad, but a thousand afflicted individuals should motivate us far more. As is often the case in our odd world of…

I've written about this topic before, but the fact that food images are powerful marketing tools deserves mention again. In the same Oxford study (see Addictive Foods) that noted that pictures of chocolate triggered areas of the brain…

The concept of "thin slicing" was popularized by Malcom Gladwell in is best-selling Blink. In short, thin slicing is the ability for people, based on their past experience, to find patterns in behavior, appearance, etc. with a very small…

Back in March, I predicted a fitness boom following a huge Newsweek cover story on exercise and the brain (Brain Improvement to Spark Fitness Boom). I'm still waiting. My own health club hasn't had an observable influx of older members…

Advertising Age's Mya Frazier has taken neuromarketing to task in Hidden Persuasion or Junk Science? Despite the alarming title, the article itself is reasonably balanced in content if not in tone. Frazier highlights some of the same…

In This is Your Brain on Money, I mentioned that I'd visit some of the other neuromarketing-related topics raised in Jason Zweig's interesting article in Money, Your money and your brain. One of these is that our brains are programmed for…

For those of us past the age of childhood, there's good news from MIT and Johns Hopkins: conclusive proof that adult brains are capable of reorganization and change. While there has been considerable evidence of brain plasticity and…