Neuromarketing

What Yogurt Can Teach Marketers

I’m not a big yogurt fan. “Live cultures” would be unacceptable (or even scary) in most foods, but are highly prized in yogurt. Nevertheless, we can all learn something from a neuromarketing study focused on the gooey dairy product.

The Buying Brain by A. K. Pradeep

Review: The Buying Brain: Secrets for Selling to the Subconscious Mind by A. K. Pradeep
The world of neuromarketing seems to be shrouded in mystery. There are no university studies that prove one can improve advertising effectiveness or design better products using brain scans or biometrics. Virtually all of the neuromarketing research to date [...]

Zilch

Zero does have a seemingly magical impact on our brains (see The Power of Free), though zero isn’t always a good thing. Zero resources, for example, are generally not good for business! That’s exactly what many non-profit organizations start with, though. In Zilch: The Power of Zero in Business, author Nancy Lublin translates her years of experience in under-resourced non-profits into strategies that can be applied by any business.

The Invisible Gorilla

Review: The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us, by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons
Before reading farther, watch this video if you haven’t already seen it:

The Invisible Gorilla provides an interesting counterpoint to Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink. While Gladwell sought to show that our minds can perform remarkable feats of judgment, often without [...]

Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior

Book Review: Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior by Geoffrey Miller
“Marketing is not just one of the most important ideas in business. It has become the dominant force in human culture.” This is how evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller leads into an early chapter on the importance of marketing. In spent, Miller sets out [...]

Shopper Marketing

Book Review: Shopper Marketing – How to Increase Purchase Decisions at the Point of Sale, Edited by Markus Stahlberg and Ville Maila
From a neuromarketing standpoint, the point of sale is a potent place to make a branding impression. One has the customer in the retail environment, the product in hand, any point of sale [...]

The Brain That Changes Itself

Book Review: The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science by Norman Doidge
For centuries, the human brain was considered largely immutable after childhood. We were told that we had all the brain cells we’d ever get by the time we were adolescents. In short, even under [...]

Body Image: Men vs. Women

Browse through the magazines at the supermarket checkout line, and you’ll find that almost every one oriented to a female audience has some kind of a weight loss plan on the cover. Male-oriented magazines, meanwhile, are more likely to show an attractive woman instead of a guy showing off the results of his three-week [...]

Does Your Product Have Enough Flaws?

The better the product, one expects, the fewer the flaws one will find. That’s why Lexus is at the top of the quality surveys, and why Yugo went out of business. That’s perfect logic, until you get to true luxury products. One of the counter-intuitive marketing characteristics of real luxury products, according [...]

You Are What You Choose

Based on the title and cover art, which shows a head stuffed with objects, I anticipated that You Are What You Choose would be chock full of decision-making insights based on neuroscience and behavioral research. Instead, de Marchi and Hamilton mostly talk about their TRAITS system for categorizing individuals and then predicting subsequent behavior.