Baby Pics Boost Altruism

One of my all-time most popular posts is Child Labor: Put That Baby to Work!, which showed how orienting a baby picture so that the baby was looking toward the headline of an ad caused people to spend more time reading that headline.…

New Neuromarketing Headsets

A couple of new headsets that can be used for neuromarketing studies won't win any fashion awards, but offer the potential to gauge consumer reactions in relatively normal situations. The first is from Hitachi, and in contrast to the…

Fight Impulse, Imagine the Future

Many of the decisions we make are guided by some kind of reward. Do I go through the McDonalds drive-thru window and get a burger and fries that will light my brain up like a Christmas tree, or do I delay eating until my planned meal-time…

Luxury, Left Brain, Right Brain

Popular psychology simplifies the different functions of our brain hemispheres by using "left brain" to indicate analytical thinking and "right brain" to mean creativity and emotion. That may be a bit of an oversimplification, but it's…

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…

Social Media Ads Beat TV

Visa "Trip for Life" TV Spot from VisaGoWorld on Vimeo. Last week, neuromarketing firm Neurofocus released summary results of a study that compared the performance of the same ad when run on television and on two Internet websites,…

Use Your Cell Phone, Save Your Brain

Neuromarketing readers know I sometimes venture into the non-marketing area of brain fitness, and I couldn't resist passing along this bit of research on cell phone use. For years, we've been hearing alarming claims that cell phone use…

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…

The Luxury Strategy

What makes a luxury brand? In The Luxury Strategy, Jean-Noel Kapferer and Vincent Bastien tell us in great detail what distinguishes "luxury" from "premium" and the merely expensive. And, as one might expect, our emotions play a huge role…