Halo 3: Brain Games

[photopress:brain_on_halo_3.jpg,full,alignleft]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 places where most players get hopelessly lost, or killed many times in a row, [...]

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Why Buy? Brandweek on Neuromarketing

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 techniques will be interesting to neuromarketing enthusiasts and skeptics alike.

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Korean Air Tries Sensory Branding – on TV

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 medium of television. I’ve seen this ad air a number of times, and was struck [...]

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Nonprofit Marketing: The Power of Personalization

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 neuromarketing and neuroeconomics, research shows that our brains operate in an illogical and perhaps unexpected [...]

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Sensory Appeal: Sight Matters

[photopress:chocolate_drizzle1.jpg,full,alignleft]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 associated with addiction when viewed by chocolate cravers, the researchers also examined the response to actual chocolate [...]

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Bad Intuition: Too-Thin Slicing

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 time sample. An expert salesperson, for example, may intuit whether a prospect is a likely buyer [...]

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Fitness Marketers Need to Get Brainy

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 and, more significantly, I haven’t see any ads that make the link between exercise and [...]

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AdAge: Neuromarketing or Neurohype?

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 neuromarketing problems we have identified here – overselling the power of the current technology to predict consumer behavior, [...]

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Contest Marketing: Beating the Odds

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 “reward anticipation” but aren’t very good at calculating odds. Big potential rewards produce big [...]

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Adult Brains Can Change

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 neurogenesis in adults, the new work uses “brain imaging and behavioral studies to show that the adult [...]

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