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fMRI + Marketing = Consumer Control?
anonomouse writes "NYT magazine has an interesting article on the use of neuro-imagery in marketing. Best (old) quote: 'Half of the money I spend on advertising is wasted, but I don't know which half'. Good, bad, whatever? Does this bode well for job opportunities for the new crops of cognitive systems graduates? Most importantly, what does brain state tell us about behavior, if anything?"
Somehow I think 50 million years to human evolution has both bred people who can convince others to do what they want and people resistant to that appeal that in both cases will be no match for any analytical approach to dissecting human puchasing habits.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
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Although it goes one layer closer to the source, fMRI has the same flaw as any other lie-detector system (which this basically acts as, except that instead of detecting lies, they want to detect the far less tangible "appeal" of a given advertisement).
With the classic lie detectors, you can trick them out simply by clenching the muscles in your butt - This causes a drastic spike in blood pressure, galvanic skin response goes nuts - basically all the classic indicators of stress become totally random.
With fMRI, or PET, or any other "direct" brain imaging technology, a comparable technique exists - Think about sex. Thanks to our brain's hard-wired affinity for reproduction, thinking about sex will completely dominate over most other brain activity. Think graphically. Think in pictures. Try to imagine smells, tastes, what the tolerably hot-in-a-geeky-way research assistant looks like naked, whatever. This will guarantee the results end up totally meaningless.
Any other strong emotion will work as well, but for most people, thinking about sex comes easiest to fake.
...and if people need it, they'll buy it. Advertisers need to quit trying so hard to lie, deceive, and manipulate people. Then they need to all kill themselves in the most painful way possible.
Just make a friggin product that does what it's supposed to do, works well, and doesn't break after 90 days. Word of mouth is the only legitimate form of advertising, and you have to earn that through the merit of your product... you can't buy it.
Stupid people make stupid things profitable.
fMRI is a great research technique -- I've worked with it for years -- but I think that zealous companies that want to find the best way to tickle comsumers' brains are going to be pretty disappointed in fMRI as a marketing research tool. (And at $400+/hr, their disappointment is going to cost them . .
What these companies want is to be able to look at a scan of someone viewing/thinking about their product and to then be able to say, "Aha, he really wants this!", or, "She is debating on whether shee needs this," or even perhaps, "This product makes him feel secure."
That's bullshit -- its mindreading -- and given what we know about the brain and the signals that can be read in an fMRI, it can't be done. Perhaps one day, far in the future, something like that will be possible. Right now, though, people are still debating what exactly it means (in terms of neural activity) when you see a brain region "light up" in an fMRI scan. And even if we could know how exactly fMRI signals and neural activity relate, there's still a
-q
So many studies are done about consumer behavior and advertisers' tactics and, yet, consumers behave exactly as they did before. For example, research by Elizabeth Loftus at UCI has shown that advertisers like Disney routinely implant memories into us. In one of her studies, subjects even believes that they had seen Bugs Bunny at Disneyland. Even after this was widely reported by the media, Disney ads have stayed the same and are still as likely to "fall prey" to them.
Obviously, the benefits to advertisers and consumers are quite asymmetrical from all this research. Advertisers can actually refine their techniques and perhaps learn new ones. Consumers, on the other hand, may be a little more educated but they certainly are more easily seduced. While this is not absolutely bad and may even be good in some ways, the fact remains that with increasingly power research tools like fMRI mentioned here, the potential for corporations to absolutely manipulate us increases. I'm sure that things will work out in the future, as they have always done. However, research into "defenses" against memory implantation, et al does need to be conducted.
Posting messages for the betterment of humanity..
It seems like what this can do now is to say to Coke "yes, your branding scheme has worked." But Coke already knows that - that's why they're beating Pepsi in the market. This is also unhelpful because it's a test of what *has worked over time*, not what *will work over time*. What is being measured is the impression Coke has made over the people in the test over the course of their lives.
The problem with this is that it doesn't tell Pepsi what to do to get the same results. Pepsi can't sit in the lab and tweak their image until they get the same results, because what's being measured isn't the effectiveness of a new image, but the degree of recognition of a well-known image.