Neuroscience Research

The subtitle of Your Money & Your Brain by Jason Zweig (Simon & Schuster, 340pp) is How The New Science of Neuroeconomics Can Make You Rich. No doubt the publishers needed to spice up the cover a bit, because the book might have…

Decision making is emerging as a key area of neuroscience research. Neuroeconomics and neuromarketing are informed by brain scan data and other studies of how people make decisions, and now Vanderbilt University is the home for a major new…

Usually marketers concentrate on getting their own message out, but sometimes it seems necessary to respond to the claims of others. The most annoying of these situations are claims or rumors that are totally false. What should one do if,…

The quest for an effective lie detector has continued for centuries, if not millennia. Unfortunately, current polygraph technology doesn't work much better than throwing an accused witch in a river to see if she sinks. For the last few…

We've been writing about "tightwads" and "spendthrifts" lately (see Tightwads, Spendthrifts, and Everyone Else and Five Keys to Selling to Tightwads), and thought Neuromarketing readers might be interested in finding out where they fall on…

One out of four potential customers for your product may not buy it, even if the purchase makes economic sense or is otherwise a good decision. A couple of days ago, in Tightwads, Spendthrifts, and Everyone Else, I wrote about research…

Marketers love to segment their potential customers, and now there's a new way to do it: spendthrifts, tightwads, and everyone else. Research at Carnegie Mellon University shows that 40% of consumers can be classified as either…

A few weeks ago, WIRED published an interesting story on the massive amount of testing that has gone into producing Halo 3. The biggest part of this has been usability testing to ensure that the game is continuously playable. By eliminating…

Logic tells us that a bigger problem should get more attention. One person suffering from a disease is certainly bad, but a thousand afflicted individuals should motivate us far more. As is often the case in our odd world of…

I've written about this topic before, but the fact that food images are powerful marketing tools deserves mention again. In the same Oxford study (see Addictive Foods) that noted that pictures of chocolate triggered areas of the brain…