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Politics is Simple: Vote for the Tall Guy

Our decisions aren’t always as rational as we think, and choosing a presidential candidate is no exception. Researchers at Texas Tech have found an innate preference for candidates who are more physically imposing. This tendency is considered to be an example of evolutionary psychology, in which modern-day humans still exhibit behaviors developed in our hunter-gatherer [...]

Rivalry Marketing

Sometimes the best thing for a brand is an enemy: a rival brand that can be the focus of advertising. The other day, Mark Gallagher and Laura Savard at the BlackCoffee blog put the advantage of focusing on a rival succinctly:

Avoiding Death by Powerpoint, the Neuro Way

Conference-goers know that at any given meeting, they will be subjected to a range of presentations – some interesting, others, well, not so interesting. Conference organizers don’t like to offer a podium to inept or boring presenters, of course – bad performances will drive away the paying customers. The approach conference organizers usually employ is [...]

Subliminal Negativity Works

People hate negative advertising. So why do advertisers (notably political campaigns) keep doing it, and why does it work? We covered this in Why Negative Ads Work, but our brains hold yet another answer, as a test with subliminal messages shows. Researcher Nilli Lavie of the UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience states, There has been [...]

Neuro-Politics: Chinese Professor Ad

It’s not common for mainstream media to analyze ads from a neuromarketing standpoint, but Adam Hanft at Salon does just that for the fascinating “Chinese professor” ad. Sponsored by a group called Citizens Against Government Waste, the ad illustrates one possible result of over-spending by government in an environment where deficits are financed by borrowing [...]

When Marketing Stinks

Olfactory marketing has been used for years, and usually the objective is to use appealing scents and create a positive branding message. Not always, though – one politician is conducting a campaign that, well, stinks. Carl Paladino, the Republican nominee for governor of New York State, has sent out a mailing that smells like garbage.

Why Politics is Hard

If you were asked to judge a policy proposal for addressing a social issue, which would be more important to you, the content of the proposal or the party that wrote it? Most of us would answer that the specific policies would be much more important than the political party that proposed it. Most of [...]

Are Political Views Hard-wired?

We know that political marketing – the art of persuading voters to support your candidate – is perhaps the most challenging and least productive form of marketing. A couple of years ago in The Neuroscience of Political Marketing, I described how research shows that political ads seem to go through an “emotional filter” that, in [...]

Neuromarketing Podcast

Last week I did an interview with Robin Young of Here & Now, a radio show distributed by Public Radio International and aired on about 50 U.S. stations. The topic was the use of neuromarketing to evaluate political ads, and also featured Dr. Stephen Sands of Sands Research discussing the firm’s EEG analysis of TV [...]

Red Brain, Blue Brain

Just in time for analyzing Super Tuesday primary results, political neuromarketing is back in the news. CNN ran a story, Reading Voters’ Minds!, on how Lucid Systems is attempting to measure real voter attitudes with various techniques borrowed from neuroscience and medicine. (You can tell CNN was excited by the story because of the exclamation [...]

« Older Entries

Politics is Simple: Vote for the Tall Guy

Rivalry Marketing

Avoiding Death by Powerpoint, the Neuro Way

Subliminal Negativity Works

Neuro-Politics: Chinese Professor Ad

When Marketing Stinks

Why Politics is Hard

Are Political Views Hard-wired?

Neuromarketing Podcast

Red Brain, Blue Brain

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Roger’s “Brainy Marketing” at Forbes

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