Neuromarketing

As the current financial chaos moves toward some kind of resolution, there will no doubt be plenty of Monday morning quarterbacking to explain what went wrong. One group that one wouldn’t expect to have explanations are neuroscientists. As it turns out, neuroscience researchers actually can shed some light on why things went so wrong.

One of the first questions that everyone asks is how so many seemingly intelligent people could make so many errors in judgment. One simple answer, of course, is greed - at least some individuals saw a way to profit personally by making poor business decisions (loaning money to people unlikely to be able to pay it back, insuring such loans, rating securities based on these shaky loans, and so on). While there’s little doubt in my mind that personal interest was the biggest underlying factor, systemic factors and even biology likely played a role. By systemic factors I mean the way many of these markets were structured. Writing a shaky loan sounds like a bad business decision, but if there are buyers for loans of this type perhaps it really isn’t a bad decision for the originator. But, on to the brain science… (more…)

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I’m a sucker for discounts. Show me something that costs $50, tell me I can have it for $25, and my hand will be reaching for my wallet while my brain is still trying to figure out whether I need the item at any price. Most of us respond that way - our brains are wired for it. Part of this effect is that the regular price is an anchor (see Anchor Pricing Strategies), and the discount price is a little voice in our head screaming, “bargain!”

Some dusty research at Ohio State shows that discount pricing isn’t always an unadulterated blessing. Beyond the obvious fact that it reduces profit margins, and that it might create a new, lower price anchor in the minds of customers, discounting can reduce customers’ enjoyment of the product! (more…)

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Here’s a scenario… You decide to venture into a cell phone store despite your reluctance to deal with a bewildering number of phones, options, plans, along with a confusing price structure. As usual, you find you’ll have to wait a bit for a salesperson. The greeter hands you a card with a big “97″ printed on it, and says, “It should only be a few minutes. We’ll call your number, 97, when a salesperson can help you.” You notice that a large digital display on the wall is showing “94.” You see it click to 95, then 96, and finally 97. The receptionist says, “Number 97, please,” and a salesperson appears to assist you. You thought nothing of the numeric ordering of customers, but it’s possible that the store had an ulterior motive: they could have been attempting to manipulate the price you would pay. Sound bizarre? Read on…

When a consumer is presented with an offer, a key element in the decision to accept or reject it is whether it appears to be a “fair deal” or not. We know that buying pain - the activation of our brain’s pain center when paying for a purchase - increases when the price seems too high. But how does that value equation work? The answer is anchoring - typically, we store an anchor price for different products that we then use to judge relative value. That sounds simple enough… but it’s actually not. Some anchor prices are stickier than others, and at times totally unrelated factors can affect these anchor points. The better marketers can understand how anchoring works, the more creative and effective pricing strategies they will be able to develop. (more…)

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Scantily clad women have been used to sell products to men for decades, and likely for millennia in one form or another. There’s little doubt that the typical male brain is wired to respond to attractive females in revealing attire. But is this a cheap attention-getting trick that has no real impact on sales, or does it actually work? Researchers shed new light on this topic by exposing subjects to either videos of women in bikinis or more neutral videos, and evaluating their decision making ability. (more…)

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The human brain didn’t evolve to pick stocks, which explains why there are so few Warren Buffets among the ranks of fund managers. Jason Zweig, author of Your Money & Your Brain (reviewed in Ignore Your Brain and Get Rich), did a lengthy interview with the Journal of Indexes. The publication, which seems to be geared to promoting index funds (funds that invest in large baskets of stocks without active stock-picking by fund managers), could hardly have chosen a better subject to interview. (more…)

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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…)

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Businesses are often portrayed as rapacious partners, seeking to squeeze every penny out of their deals. Indeed, some are… the result is often a relationship between defined by a fat contract that seeks to protect both parties against bad behavior by the other. New research, which draws on both conventional research and brain-scan driven neuroeconomics studies, reaches the surprising conclusion that fairness is the key to maximizing profits: (more…)

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Hot on the heels of learning that more expensive wine tastes better, we find that more expensive placebos are more effective at controlling pain: (more…)

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Behavioral economics and neuroeconomics are closely related fields, rather in the same way that psychology and neuroscience are related. It seems that Democrat presidential hopeful Barack Obama has a behavioral economist on his staff. The New Republic reports on the University of Chicago’s Richard Thaler’s role in the Obama campaign:

As it happens, Thaler is revered by the leading wonks on Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. Though he has no formal role, Thaler presides as a kind of in-house intellectual guru, consulting regularly with Obama’s top economic adviser, a fellow University of Chicago professor named Austan Goolsbee. “My main role has been to harass Austan, who has an office down the hall from mine, ” Thaler recently told me. “I give him as much grief as possible.” You can find subtle evidence of this influence across numerous Obama proposals. For example, one key behavioral finding is that people often fail to set aside money for retirement even when their employers offer generous 401(k) plans. If, on the other hand, you automatically enroll workers in 401(k)s but allow them to opt out, most stick with it. Obama’s savings plan exploits this so-called “status quo” bias.

As Jonah Lehrer of The Frontal Cortex notes, this is a rather minimal behavioral component, but it’s still encouraging to see some elements of practicality and an understanding of actual human behavior become part of a presidential campaign.

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Why Choose This Book? How We Make Decisions by Read Montague sounds like the perfect read for neuromarketing and neuroeconomics enthusiasts. In fact, the book does provide some interesting insights but the overall density of actionable information, at least for marketers, is fairly low. The title might lead one to believe that the book is a distillation of consumer purchasing behavior, but in fact it is a wide-ranging discussion of the neuroscience of human decision making. (more…)

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