political marketing

Our decisions aren't always as rational as we think, and choosing a presidential candidate is no exception. Researchers at Texas Tech have found an innate preference for candidates who are more physically imposing. This tendency is…

Sometimes the best thing for a brand is an enemy: a rival brand that can be the focus of advertising. The other day, Mark Gallagher and Laura Savard at the BlackCoffee blog put the advantage of focusing on a rival succinctly:

Conference-goers know that at any given meeting, they will be subjected to a range of presentations - some interesting, others, well, not so interesting. Conference organizers don't like to offer a podium to inept or boring presenters,…

People hate negative advertising. So why do advertisers (notably political campaigns) keep doing it, and why does it work? We covered this in Why Negative Ads Work, but our brains hold yet another answer, as a test with subliminal…

It's not common for mainstream media to analyze ads from a neuromarketing standpoint, but Adam Hanft at Salon does just that for the fascinating "Chinese professor" ad. Sponsored by a group called Citizens Against Government Waste, the…

Olfactory marketing has been used for years, and usually the objective is to use appealing scents and create a positive branding message. Not always, though - one politician is conducting a campaign that, well, stinks. Carl Paladino,…

If you were asked to judge a policy proposal for addressing a social issue, which would be more important to you, the content of the proposal or the party that wrote it? Most of us would answer that the specific policies would be much…

We know that political marketing - the art of persuading voters to support your candidate - is perhaps the most challenging and least productive form of marketing. A couple of years ago in The Neuroscience of Political Marketing, I…

Last week I did an interview with Robin Young of Here & Now, a radio show distributed by Public Radio International and aired on about 50 U.S. stations. The topic was the use of neuromarketing to evaluate political ads, and also…

Just in time for analyzing Super Tuesday primary results, political neuromarketing is back in the news. CNN ran a story, Reading Voters' Minds!, on how Lucid Systems is attempting to measure real voter attitudes with various techniques…