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Using Neuromarketing to Sell Products
Cyan Peppa writes "Marketplace on CBC, that's a Canadian station for you Americans, had an interesting story on neuromarketing tonight. '...Neuromarketing uses traditional neuroscientific methods to determine the drivers behind consumer choices. Using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), researchers map brain patterns of participants, to reveal how they respond to a particular advertisement or product. This information can be used as the basis for new advertising campaigns and branding techniques...'
Now, I'm no genius, but isn't something like this wrong? Personally, I don't like advertisements tapdancing on the chest of my own free will...What do you think?"
The article is careless; they must be talking about fMRI, not MRI. The latter is the more familiar technology that provides images of brain morphology, usually by tweaking water protons. While the researchers are doubtless imaging to provide reference localization -- that is, a map of the brain -- the fMRI is entirely different because it measures brain metabolism, which is higher in parts of the brain that are more active, and so buring more sugar. So the first is a picture that looks like sliced brain, the latter is a map of hot spots that looks like an IR sensor image. They can integrate this with EEG (electroencephalogram), also, something we also couldn't do with old MRI. Cool.
Check here -- the first image you see is an overlay of functional hot spots (color) over a regular MRI (B&W). While on the topic of medical acronyms, there is not "CAT scan" anymore, it's CT for computed tomography. The earliest machines could only do axial cuts, hence "A" in CAT. But the public and TV shows like saying CAT. I used to work around CT, too, almost 20 years ago.
I'm jealous because I did research on psychiatric patients with MRI ten years ago, which was limited to detected tumors, atrophy, and other gross physical changes. That's very useful -- people with mental illnes have in some cases revealed what appears to be long-term degeneration marked by atrophy (shrinkage) of relevant lobes --but does not have the amazing possibilities of instantly detecting changes in brain activity. This is quite a bit short of reading your mind! Just 10 years ago the imaging MRI was a stunning achievement, now we're spoiled and moving into the next phase.
Is this research for marketing purposes invasive? Nah. It's just an (expensive) attempt to further quantify reaction to marketing, as has been done up to now with questionnaries and the like. It's not sneaky like subliminal advertising, which didn't work anyway despite being a compelling idea and making for a great episode of Columbo (conspiracy theorists disagree; scientists generally don't; but advertisers and maybe Republicans still try it anyway).
Anyway, advertisers have long had a general idea (sex) of (sex) what (sex) moves (sex) product (send me money). The marketers looking upon consumers as a horde of cattle, that's kind of patronizing, but it's nothing new.
Popular science reporting seems the art of taking fairly mundane research and making it sound much more exciting, wonderful, dangerous than it really is. Such as this article for instance.
They are purporting that with MRI scans of people's brains they can "read your unconscious thoughts", like some Orwellian nightmare and then pull these subconscious strings to get you to empty your wallet at the nearest GAP outlet.
Well, being myself a student of the cognitive sciences, I'd like to set a few things clear. The ability to "read thoughts" as purported by this article, while not technically false, is much more primitive than you could imagine.
An MRI of the brain can give you a picutre of what cells are most active at any given point, so you can see relatively what brain centres dominate and try to make inferences from that as to what the person is thinking. Given that our knowledge of brain function is at a very primitive level, the most useful data you can get from this type of scan is "he likes it" or "he doesn't like it". It will not tell you what images, feelings, sounds, associations are passing through the subjects head at any point, only whether they are generally positive or not. Its really no different from putting a bunch of boxes on a chart and asking the person to rate from one to ten how well they like certain things - except you get that rating directly from the brain rather than from asking the person. So in theory this ranking is more "honest" and less clouded by other factors such as social obligations, etc. which might interfere with what a person would say when asked.
The idea that this technology can be used in some Orwellian fashion to understand that secretly you are afraid of rats, or are a pedophile or like the look of women eating juicy mangoes is not going to happen anytime soon. It is unlikely that that level of analysis is ever going to be possible. Ok, end of rant.
There are a thousand forms of subversion, but few can equal the convenience and immediacy of a cream pie -Noel Godin
Now, I'm no genius, but isn't something like this wrong?
Go read a Sociology textbook. There are decades of tales about cult leaders, population control, con artists, etc. Tales about power over other people.
Now go read a Management or Marketing textbook...same thing, but different jargon.
Except now, their tatics will be even more potent, as they manipulate our core humanity against us. Don't be suprised when the hopeless flocks grow even greater than before.
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
Check those facts, please.
Good response. I just have two caveats.
The idea is that areas that are being actively used will get increased blood flow, but this happens on the order of tens of seconds, so it doesn't really provide a detailed picture of brain activity.
There are two kinds of experimental designs one can employ with fMRI. You are referring to "block" designs, where in fact the neural response is aggregated over tens of seconds. However, "event-related" designs permit temporal resolutions of 1.5 seconds, and I have seen some studies that clam 0.5 seconds. So, fMRI can do a bit better time-wise than you think.
The other dimension of interest is spatial resolution. Just like a computer screen is composed of 2D pixels, fMRI partitions brains into 3D voxels. The smallest voxels sizes that current technologies allow is on the order of 10s of cubic mms. However, Logothetis and colleagues have pioneered more invasive techniques that allow voxels that are several orders of magnitude smaller. The only drawback is that they can't be used in humans.
However, advertisers can gain minute knowledge of how animals respond to different ads! Perhaps Alpo, Purina, and the like should use neuromarketing.
Some more info:
From this site
The Amazing "Eat Popcorn," "Drink Coke" Hoax
How can we account for the widespread belief in subliminal persuasion ? There are several reasons why people find this rather odd proposition to have some merit. For one thing, most people believe that some sort of scientific study was done years ago which used subliminal messages to increase Coke and popcorn sales in a New Jersey movie theater. This became the paradigmatic case of subliminal persuasion.
There was a report in the media of an ostensible six-week study of patrons of a movie theater in Fort Lee, New Jersey, in 1956, where, the story went, advertising specialist James Vicary had secretly used a device on the movie projectors which flashed suggestions to buy popcorn and drink Coke. Vicary claimed to have increased Coke sales by 18.1% and popcorn sales by 57.7%. So well accepted was this claim that this apocryphal story is, I am told, still related in some undergraduate psychology classes as if it were a scientific study.
The reports of this fed the public fears and imagination in a powerful way which turned out to be much more potent than the method in Vicary's study. His study in fact turned out to be a hoax, as admitted by Vicary (Danzig, 1962) and demonstrated by repeated failures to replicate the supposed effect,. (Weir, 1984; Advertising Age, 1958). Nor have there ever been any successful replications to this date, or any clear evidence that subliminal messages can significantly influence behavior. What passes for evidence of subliminal persuasion is simply reliable evidence that subjects detect some stimuli that they are not aware of detecting, and that such perception can influence simple lexical priming tasks, not attitudes or behaviors.,,,,. (Pratkanis & Greenwald, 1988; McConnell. Cutler, and McNeil, 1958; Goldiamond, 1958; McConnell, 1966; McConnell, 1989a)