Neuromarketing

Advertisers and marketers are always looking for ways to get inside the heads of their customers and prospects to learn what really motivates them to buy. One of the latest techniques comes from neuroscientists, who have been experimenting with fMRI scans to tap into subconscious bias they say traditional advertising methods miss.

The example in the article was the age old dilemma – why do people who prefer the taste of Pepsi faithfully buy Coke?

Neuromarketing caught public attention by recreating a famous soda pop conundrum inside a brain scanner: why is Coke more popular than Pepsi when more people pick Pepsi in blind taste tests? Neuroimaging expert Read Montague from Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, scanned people’s brains using fMRI as they blindly drank either Coke or Pepsi and reported which tasted best. He found that a region called the ventral putamen within the striatum lit up most strongly when people drank their favourite soda. This area is known to be associated with seeking reward. More people preferred Pepsi, just as the decades-old challenge said.

But when people were told which soda they were drinking, their preferences changed: more people chose Coke. And this time the brain area that showed most activity was the medial prefrontal cortex, a spot associated with higher cognitive processes. The results – which Montague hopes to publish soon – showed that people make decisions based on their memories or impressions of a particular soda, as well as taste. In the advertising world, this “brand recognition” is one of the most sought-after qualities advertisers attempt to engender.

Future experiments are to focus on whether neuromarketing techniques can predict results better than traditional surveys where people must accurately report their own preferences. It will be very interesting to see where this type of research leads…

» Read Article: They know what you want (Subscription required)

New Scientist vol 183 issue 2458 – 31 July 2004, page 36

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