Neuromarketing

   
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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Long recognized psychological phenomena and various aspects of human behavior are being localized in the brain daily, it seems, and the latest to be studied is discovery, often referred to as an “Aha!” or “Eureka!” moment. This is the turning point when one realizes that one has found what one is looking for or has solved a vexing problem. Before we get carried away with spotting the next Archimedes or Einstein, caution is in order - researchers based their conclusions on studying Rhesus monkeys, a species not often known for deep reflection or scientific discovery. (more…)

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For Neuromarketing readers, it’s not big news that the perception of wine drinkers is altered by what they know about the wine (see Wine and the Spillover Effect, for example). Now, researchers at Stanford and Caltech have demonstrated that people’s brains experience more pleasure when they think they are drinking a $45 wine instead of a $5 bottle - even when it’s the same stuff. The important aspect of these findings is that people aren’t rationalizing on a survey, i.e., reporting that a wine tastes better because they know it’s a lot more expensive. Rather, they are actually experiencing a tastier wine. (more…)

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Neuromarketers may be their own worst enemies. Neuromarketing, and its slightly more established sibling, neuroeconomics, are exciting areas in which new research findings pop up every week. Unfortunately, the rush to commercialize the technology seems to lead to an overabundance of hype and claims that are difficult to back up. A good example is the recent New York Times Op-Ed piece This Is Your Brain on Politics which we chronicled in Political Neuromarketing. (more…)

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Most scientists have dismissed the idea of reading minds using technology as pure science fiction, but Carnegie Mellon University researchers have moved a step closer to doing so. Not only have they been able to identify which of several images a subject is looking at using fMRI scans of their brains. The most startling result is that the CMU researchers were able to take the data from the initial batch of subjects and repeat the identification feat with new subjects. (more…)

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Big companies often find great ways to aggravate their customers, and cell phone giant Sprint proves the point. John Wall of the Ronin Marketing blog posted a rant about Sprint’s advertising for their Centro Palm smartphone, Screw Your Customers. Wall was understandably miffed when he found out that the $99 advertised price for the phone applied only to new customers, and that as an existing four-phone Sprint customer, he would have to pay $250 for the Centro. Beyond exacting what appears to be a penalty for customer loyalty, Sprint has committed a second sin of the neuromarketing variety. (more…)

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