Post-Super Bowl Briefing

Very soon, we will be subjected to a variety of neuromarketing-based opinions on which Super Bowl 2010 ads worked, and which didn't. While we are awaiting these analyses, I thought I'd point readers at a good article on one kind of…

Guard Your Reptilian Brain!

Every year or so, some fuzzy-thinking critic reads an article about neuromarketing, becomes extremely agitated, and tries to raise the alarm about marketers turning consumers into mind-controlled zombies. The latest push of the…

Neuromanagement: The Rule of Three?

Trivia question: Why were local phone numbers originally seven digits long? The answer is that in the early days of local phone service, researchers found that seven digit numbers were about as long as most people could remember…

Your Brain on Stories

"They laughed when I sat down at the piano..." "On a beautiful late spring afternoon, twenty-five years ago, two young men graduated from the same college. They were very much alike, these two young men. Both had been better than average…

Start Me Up: Brilliant Billboard

Billboards can be an effective medium, but tend to be very low in viewer engagement. Most outdoor advertising is designed to be viewed in a second or less as motorists whiz by. Here's an example of how one advertiser turned that idea…

Green Marketing: Light Up Sales

"Green marketing" usually refers to using an environmental pitch to sell a product. A car creates less pollution, a paper product is made from recycled content, and so on. Results of appealing to environmental sentiment have been…

Food, Shelter, and Big Words

Decades ago, Abraham Maslow proposed that humans had a hierarchy of needs, with food being at the most basic level of biological need and shelter one step above as part of a "safety" need. He may have been on the right track, according to…

Pricing Lessons from Restaurants

My last Neuromarketing post, Neuro-Menus and Restaurant Psychology, talked about various things restaurant menu engineers do to maximize sales and profits. I think it's worth calling special attention to one aspect touched on in that post:…