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Tightwads, Spendthrifts, and Everyone Else

1. October 2007

Marketers love to segment their potential customers, and now there’s a new way to do it: spendthrifts, tightwads, and everyone else. Research at Carnegie Mellon University shows that 40% of consumers can be classified as either spendthrifts or tightwads, while 60% fall into a middle category without strong tendencies in either direction. Furthermore, this behavior [...]

Nonprofit Marketing: The Power of Personalization

20. September 2007

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Logic tells us that a bigger problem should get more attention. One person suffering from a disease is certainly bad, but a thousand afflicted individuals should motivate us far more. As is often the case in our odd world of neuromarketing and neuroeconomics, research shows that our brains operate in an illogical and perhaps unexpected [...]

AdAge: Neuromarketing or Neurohype?

10. September 2007

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Advertising Age’s Mya Frazier has taken neuromarketing to task in Hidden Persuasion or Junk Science? Despite the alarming title, the article itself is reasonably balanced in content if not in tone. Frazier highlights some of the same neuromarketing problems we have identified here – overselling the power of the current technology to predict consumer behavior, [...]

Contest Marketing: Beating the Odds

7. September 2007

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In This is Your Brain on Money, I mentioned that I’d visit some of the other neuromarketing-related topics raised in Jason Zweig’s interesting article in Money, Your money and your brain. One of these is that our brains are programmed for “reward anticipation” but aren’t very good at calculating odds. Big potential rewards produce big [...]

“Want” vs. “Should” – It’s All in The Timing

31. August 2007

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Everyone is familiar with the want vs. should conflict. Do you order the loaded cheese fries as your side dish, or the steamed broccoli? You want the greasy fries, but you know you should order the broccoli. Do you cut the grass (should) or watch football (want)? Research by Todd Rogers, Katherine L. Milkman, and [...]

“Don’t Buy” Button Located in Brain

27. August 2007

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One of the enduring fictions of neuromarketing is that there is a “buy button” in the brain. Marketers salivate at the thought, and consumer groups fear it. (Some might say that marketers have been pushing that button with seductive products and advertisements long before neuroscience was a recognized discipline!) In reality, though, decision making is [...]

This is Your Brain on Money

24. August 2007

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The human mind may be well suited to surviving in dangerous forests and plains, but it doesn’t do as well with modern financial decisions. A lengthy and interesting article in Money by Jason Zweig (read it online at CNNMoney.com – Your money and your brain.) highlights some of the areas where our brain’s decision-making processes [...]

The Mating Mind: Is Boosting Sex Appeal the Brain’s Primary Purpose?

3. August 2007

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The Mating Mind. A prof at the University of New Mexico has an interesting suggestion: the evolution of the human brain was largely driven by finding better ways to appeal to the opposite sex. Geoffrey Miller is a man with a theory that, if true, will change the way people think about themselves. His idea [...]

Better Brain Scans

24. July 2007

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[photopress:new_mri.jpg,thumb,alignleft]Despite the pretty pictures generated by today’s fMRI machines, they are lacking in both spatial and temporal resolution. Siemens is addressing this issue by commercializing a new kind of scanner technology that uses an array of sensors to produce more detail in less time. MRI machines in medical centers typically have up to 12 coils, [...]

High Testosterone Marketing

12. July 2007

2 comments

[photopress:high_testosterone.jpg,full,centered] How does marketing to high-testosterone males differ from pitching their lower testosterone counterparts? And who are those testosterone-rich individuals? Recent neuroeconomics research gives us some clues. As reported in the New Scientist, Harvard researcher Terry Burnham tested male subjects with the Ultimatum Game after measuring their testosterone levels. The Ultimatum Game gives one player [...]

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