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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?"
to make better products!
Surrender YR pattent!
Advertisers are just doing what they have always done. They are just using new tools to see how they affect consumers.
There isn't necessarily anything sinister about it.
There should be a moderation category "Dumbest Comment EVER"
I smell the distinct scent of subliminals around this. Which is to say, it's a sexy, seductive idea, sure to garner oodles of funding from idiots in various marketing departments, but its relevance is limited... and kudos to the researchers for thinking of such a silly but powerful way to run their gravy train!
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
I personally don't think this is any worse than ad agencies doing market research to determine which ads work and which ones won't. This is just taking it to the next level.
Don't get me wrong, I dislike advertisements as much as the next guy, but what differentiates me (and most of hte geek community) from the next guy is that fact that I know how to look at an ad and know when I should and should not listen to what's being said. When someone watching an ad is aware of the techniques used to create the ad, it's not very likely to work.
Example: The annoying beer commercials designed to associate their beer with having fun. I know that's what they are doing, so I know to ignore the commercial.
I seriously doubt any ad developed using this technique will be so effective as to hinder my ability to logically conclude whether or not the product being advertised is actually worth spending money on.
Personally, I don't like advertisements tapdancing on the chest of my own free will...What do you think
If they're able to build advertising to get you to buy the product from this "technology" you really don't have free will do you? They're just abusing you of the idea that you have free will.
I'm the big fish in the big pond bitch.
People worry too much that this thing is gonna turn into some mind control. We are all faced everyday with things we want/want to do, and we spend all day denying ourselves most of these things. I mean, just seeing a hot girl fills my head with all sorts of thoughts and feelings, but it doesn't make me act any different then i would normally.
Programming is simply the application of logic to creativity
It is different.
Ask people, they might just lie, or reply in a slightly distorded way.
By using MRI, scientists can know what parts of the brain are / may be stimulated by ads, so what kind of feelings we got when seeing / hearing it...
Of course it's not (only) because we think product A is funnier than product B that we buy A, other factors hopefully are taken into account too...
Tsuyoikoto ha taisetsu da ne, dakedo namida mo hitsuyousa (Strength is an important thing, but tears too are necessary)
Marketing doesn't work anyway. I wear Nikes because they're fast, not because they look good on TV.
Are you being intentionally funny? Why do you think that "Nikes are fast?" Was there a consumer study I missed? The only one I read said that Nikes were no better than other shoes. Did you do your own experiment to come to this conclusion? Which brand of sneaker did you use as your control.
Or do you think that "Nikes are fast" because that's just umm... common knowledge? And where did that come from?
God is real unless declared integer
Well, except in Microsoft's case.
"See, we plan ahead! That way, we never have to do anything now."
When I went to school I was told that capitalism is based on free markets and competition. No need for central planning, simply let market forces select the best product.... but now we have adds that can effectively hipnotize you into buying some shit... "must buy beer, swedish bikini good" style adds....
This seems to have more in common with communist propaganda than with core values of capitalism...
2c worth.
An advert might annoy you, yet cause you to be more likely to buy the product. I can sense you getting annoyed right about now, but I'm talking in general, not specifically about you. I buy Sprite when I'm thirsty - but I really don't know if it's because of the "Obey your thirst" adverts or not. They annoy me, but maybe it is.
The difference is that they are trying to monitor the stimulus response mechanism of the people involved.
I do not know of any scientific study or body of knowledge that directly studies the pathology of the stimulus response mechanism as a mechanism by itself. You have to go outside the mainstream sciences to see anything looking at the area. Psychoanlysis, for example, does not study this, and addresses it indirectly if ever. Psychiatry, with it's love affair for medication, is more of the same.
In fact this is the first such study that I have even heard of, and the use of it is not theraputic at all. Unless the therapy is that of weight reduction of an obese wallet.
A therapy would be interested in looking at stimulus response mechanisms, and learning to help people whose mechanisms are out of whack. {example: I knew a gal whose boy friends, each in turn, all that the same first name. creepy)
This is no such thing. It is research for better mind control of the consumer today.
You would thing that this would be a fruitful area for research if you actually wanted to help folks. But the money seems to be focused elsewhere. I wonder why?
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Marketing monkeys have money to throw around using MRIs for product targeting while HMO members have to fight tooth and nail to get HMOs to cough up money to use MRIs for life-and-death situations.
Eternity: will that be smoking, or non-smoking? I Corinthians 6:9-10
I don't like advertisements tapdancing on the chest of my own free will...What do you think
then it's not free will. how about that?
By using MRI, scientists can know what parts of the brain are / may be stimulated by ads, so what kind of feelings we got when seeing / hearing it..
They can't tell what "feelings" a person is experiencing. Emotions aren't individually localizable to regions of the brain.
They can tell whether an area of the brain generally responsible for emotions (e.g., orbitofrontal cortex) is being engaged versus one generally responsible for deliberate reasoning (e.g., the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex). This could reveal whether an ad prompts emotional or logical responses, generally speaking.
But that's about it given the limitations of the technology and cognitive neuroscience.
Disclaimer: The site was borderline slashdotted so I couldn't read the source article.
It's the eventual political application of this. Politicians appealing directly to the subconcious and potentially overriding the concious/rational choices (we hope) the public would make.
You Are Being Lied To.
The world of The Space Merchants draws nearer every day.
DDB
Life is like surrealism: if you have to have it explained to you, you can't afford it.
What I want to know is, where are they getting the people to lie still and take a brain scan while looking at ads? Are there really people out there who like ads sufficiently to do that? Are they paying a really, really rowrbazzle lot of money?!
Are the experimental subject people crazy?! I mean, what's the angle here? I mean, what do they say to putative volunteers, "Oh, we're going to bombard you with commercials and take pictures of your thoughts while we do it, so we can make more and more irresistable ads"? I don't get it.
I mean, the research is one thing. You have to admit that, since the crawling slime are running out of venues in which to place their scrofulous offerings, they must want to make them work better (although I doubt that will lessen the saturation level!). However, where (and how) are they finding their research subjects?
This isn't precisely the kind of research they can do on rhesus monkeys or something (although with the way ads are now, you'd think they were written by planaria for rhesus monkeys, or something), but who's giving that famous "informed consent"?
Eeek! An entirely new meaning of the ad-copy phrase "Not tested on animals"!
--shudder-- Ok, I'm scaring myself. I'd better stop now.
I'm not a geek, I'm just a clever script.
Well, the myth goes that you hide words/pictures related to sex (especially "sex"), death and any other primal stuff like that (can't remember offhand), and your brain picks it up and stores it along with the brand name. Then, when you are shopping, you look at a drink, or coffee or whatever, and subconciously you go `ah!` as your mind drags out the subliminal implant. So look for that sort of thing. If you search google for some combination of:
Wilson Bryan Key
subliminal
subconcious
advert
advertising
sex
hidden
you`ll find a bunch of examples.
And I'm sure every member of every focus group says the same thing.
But the fact is, I (as a hypothetical advertising researcher) know that the majority of the populus can be convinced to buy pure crap. I've put billions of dollars into researching the behavior of the entire populus, not the behavior of individuals. I have you classified and sorted, and know which bell to ring to make you salivate.
If you can't be convinced, you're outside of my target market (top-of-the-bell-curve sheep) and I don't care about you anyway. I'll just label you as "Geek" or "Nerd" and concentrate my efforts back toward getting the sheep to go where I lead them.