Neuromarketing

This may not be news to parents of small kids, but branding is a potent force even among preschool children. A new study of preschoolers in California shows that kids will even eat carrot sticks if they come in a McDonald’s wrapper.…

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…

What does your marketing program smell like? If you have difficulty answering that question, you need to get up to speed on the powerful impact that's possible by activating your customers' olfactory nerves. (Web-only marketers won't have…

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…

We all know what the placebo effect is - give a group of patients a sugar pill instead of a medication with active ingredients, and some of them will show an improvement in their symptoms. Drug researchers treat the placebo effect as an…

"About 95% of all thought, emotion, and learning occur in the unconscious mind - that is, without our conscious awareness." -Gerald Zaltman, in How Customers Think This is a basic premise of almost everything we write about here at…

Side-to-side eye movements have been shown to improve memory, according to researchers in the UK and the US. They speculate that the eye movement causes the two hemispheres of the brain to interact with each other more, but a mechanism…

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…

Why We Buy - The Science of Shopping, by Paco Underhill, isn't exactly what the title might imply. It's not a neuromarketing text, it doesn't delve deep into the psyches of consumers, and it doesn't disclose the hidden motivations of…