Jim Edwards of Brandweek has penned an interesting and lengthy article describing his own experience as a neuromarketing subject, as well as providing some general background on the promise offered and challenges faced by the nascent science. In an interesting neurobranding test, Edwards had his brain scanned by Joy Hirsch, director of the Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Center at Columbia University, while viewing brands he liked and disliked. While one subject is hardly statistically significant, the results were intriguing. (more…)
Articles about 'fMRI'
Wed 27 Aug 2008
Branding: Does Hate Trump Love?
Posted by Roger Dooley under Neuromarketing , Neuroscience Research , Branding[2] Comments
Digg itFri 15 Aug 2008
A Pretty Woman Beats a Good Loan Deal
Posted by Roger Dooley under Neuromarketing , Neuroscience Research[3] Comments
Marketers are constantly facing the challenge of how to make an offer more attractive to their customers. Will free shipping garner more orders than a $10 coupon? What about a 10% discount, or a free tote bag? Smart marketers know there is only one way to definitively answer this kind of question: test the options in the marketplace. (Soon, perhaps, neuromarketing technology like fMRI brain scans may reduce the need for field testing…)
One South African bank trying to boost their loan business did just that. They mailed 50,000 customers a loan offer, and used several variations in the direct mail package. First, the offers included a range of randomly selected interest rates - presumably, the interest rate (along with repayment terms) is by far the most important criteria for whether a loan offer is appealing. More significantly for our interests, the bank also included several “psychological features” - details of the mailed offer that had nothing to do with the loan itself but were intended to “frame” the offer in some way or otherwise alter customer behavior. The researchers seem to have been surprised not only that these irrelevant offer changes boosted the response of their offers, but actually offset the impact of higher interest rates on loan signups. (more…)
Mon 7 Jul 2008
Book Review: Predictably Irrational
Posted by Roger Dooley under Neuromarketing , Neuroscience Research , Neuroscience and Marketing Books[2] Comments
Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely does a great job of demolishing the idea that people make decisions in a rational manner. Ariely, a behavioral economist at Duke, describes dozens of experiments that show how we procrastinate, when we cheat, how we interpret prices (definitely a neuromarketing hot button), and much more. Ariely’s work is fascinating at least in part because of the simplicity of most of his experiments. Instead of using multi-million dollar fMRI machines, Ariely’s work tends to involve a simple concept, a few props, and willing subjects (always plentiful on college campuses). The simplicity is deceptive, though, because the results demonstrate the complexity of the brain’s decision-making process. (more…)
Thu 26 Jun 2008
Marketers know there are potent words in advertising, like “Free” and “New.” Neuroscientists have now determined that the appeal of “new” is hard-wired into our brains. Novelty activates our brain’s reward center, which may have been an evolutionary advantage to our ancestors as they encountered new food sources or other elements of survival. Today, we are no longer hunters and gatherers, but the novelty-seeking circuitry is still active and makes us find new products (and even repackaged old products) attractive. (more…)
Mon 23 Jun 2008
Slate science writer Daniel Engber finds the concept of neuromarketing dubious, and in particular has a problem with FKF Applied Research. FKF has been particularly successful in getting highly visible press coverage of its interpretations of fMRI brain scans. That the conclusions reached are sometimes obvious and sometimes contradictory doesn’t seem to bother FKF nearly as much as it gets under Engber’s skin. The latest affront to Engber’s scientific sensibility was a lengthy piece in the Atlantic written by Jeffrey Goldberg (see Jeffrey Goldberg’s Brain). (more…)
Wed 18 Jun 2008
Ever wonder what goes on inside a journalist’s head when he thinks about politics, television shows, or his boss? An article in The Atlantic, My Amygdala, My Self, tells us that and more. The intro to the piece notes that correspondent Jeffrey Goldberg was “intrigued and alarmed” by the new concept of neuromarketing, and decided to enter an fMRI machine and have his brain scanned while he viewed videos and photos on a variety of topics. The scanning was done by FKF Applied Research, known for past rankings of Super Bowl ads.
Early in the article, there’s a nice point/counterpoint on the reliability of the interpretation of fMRI data:
Still, I wondered to what degree this was truly scientific and to what degree it was 21st-century phrenology. The columnist David Brooks, who is writing a book about the brain, encouraged my skepticism when I talked to him about this. “My fear is that this is like flying over Los Angeles at night, looking at the lights in the houses and trying to guess what people are talking about at dinner,” he said.
I mentioned Brooks’s doubts to the neuroscientist [Marco] Iacoboni, who dismissed them, but with a caveat. “This is not one-to-one mapping,” he said. “You have to interpret the data within the context of the brain activation. It’s not mathematical, but it can give you an amazing understanding of what lights up different parts of the brain.” Iacoboni, a world leader in the study of mirror neurons—cells in the brain that help us process the emotions and actions of other people (his new book, Mirroring People, has much to say about the connection between autism and “broken” mirror neurons)—told me that in order for his team to sift my brain comprehensively, I would have to spend a full week undergoing fMRI screening. But even an hour inside the machine would yield a baseline understanding of my neurological predispositions.
The tone of the article is breezy, and we learn that Goldberg’s brain seems to be a bit afraid of Jimmy Carter (whose book he just panned) but finds actress Edie Falco hot. (Some guilt showed up with Falco’s picture, too, no doubt because Goldberg was aware that people were peering inside his brain while he was appreciating the actress.) Some findings were unexpected, like a seeming positive reaction to Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad - an individual for whom Goldberg has little sympathy. The scientists tried to force-fit an explanation involving Goldberg’s anticipation that Ahmadinejad would eventually fall from power to explain his brain’s reaction, but that example showed the limitations of current brain scan interpretation.
All in all, the article doesn’t do much to boost neuromarketing credibility, but it’s highly readable and will definitely help readers unfamiliar with the area gain a better understanding of how neuromarketing practitioners ply their trade.
Mon 9 Jun 2008
The use of brain imaging in evaluating advertising and products is increasing, and one wonders if the judgment of marketing execs could be clouded by the presence of colorful scan images when used to back up humdrum conclusions in the text. The answer is almost certainly, “Yes.” A recent study showed that students found studies more believable when accompanied by brain images - even when those images added no information to the text content. Cognitive Daily reports on several studies which used both invented and real studies to test the effect of brain images on credibility: (more…)
Mon 2 Jun 2008
Mind Reading Progress
Posted by Roger Dooley under Neuromarketing , Neuroscience ResearchNo Comments
Reading a person’s thoughts may still be science fiction, but researchers at Carnegie-Mellon University are making surprising progress in specific types of “mind reading.” The team, led by computer scientist Tom Mitchell and cognitive neuroscientist Marcel Just, has demonstrated that they can correctly determine the concrete noun subjects are thinking three out of four times: (more…)
Tue 29 Apr 2008
Money, Social Status Similar in Brain
Posted by Roger Dooley under Neuromarketing , Neuroscience Research[3] Comments
Why do people do things that will gain them social approval? It turns out that the same parts of the brain are activated for a positive social outcome as for a monetary reward. In other words, the same reward circuitry is turned on both by social and monetary gains. Corporate marketers as well as non-profit fundraisers have always known that most individuals crave social approval, but these new findings show how our brains process these social rewards and how they relate to money. (more…)
Thu 3 Apr 2008
Sexy Pics Beat Ugly Spiders
Posted by Roger Dooley under Neuromarketing , Neuroscience Research , Neuroeconomics[3] Comments
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, stimulate the reward center in the brain and induce the viewers to take greater financial risks than subjects who saw neutral (office supplies) or negative (big spider) images. This effect was purely a priming effect, as all of the images were irrelevant to the subsequent decision. The implications of this work could be broad, impacting such diverse areas as gaming and auto sales. (more…)
Subscribe
