Make Buying Difficult?

Marketers expend a great deal of effort making it easy to buy their products. They expand distribution channels, offer financing alternatives, and when possible ensure the customer can leave with the product at time of purchase. After all, if you think of the sales process as a funnel (or perhaps a leaky funnel), every little [...]

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fMRI, Neuron Data Validated

Brain scans using fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) don’t always get a lot of respect. They have been accused of being used to produce research that is colorful but not particularly insightful. One study used fMRI to find activity in the brains of dead salmon (Are Brain Scan Findings Fishy?). Some have even suggested that [...]

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Sexy Pics Beat Ugly Spiders

  Erotic images sell better than pictures of office supplies, and a lot better than photos of hairy spiders. Who knew? Actually, that’s a bit of an oversimplification. Stanford researchers led by neuroeconomics prof Brian Knutson have found that positive images, in this case mildly erotic photos of men and women shown to heterosexual men, [...]

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Cultural Brain Differences

It appears that neuromarketing practitioners face one more challenge in analyzing brain scans. Research at Stony Brook University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Stanford University shows that people from East Asian cultures use their brain differently than people raised in the U.S. The study, titled “Cultural Influences on Neural Substrates of Attentional Control,” appeared [...]

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