Slashdot Mirror
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.
A /. will analyze adds different. He/She will:
1. See if they can use the product being advertise.
2. Check if there is a free alternative.
3. Check Google/Google groups for negative comments about the product.
4. Search Google/Google groups for competitive product.
6. Do an on-line merchant price comparison.
5. Check their bank account balance on-line and see if they have dough. Some of them will actually start doing spread sheet calculation to see how it fits to the overall monthly budget.
6. Buy the product if it is deemed worthy.
Your average Joe on the other hand will:
1. See and add while watching Survivor.
2. Think the product is very good because the add was cool.
3. Go out and buy the product the next day.
-----
One is born into aristocracy, but mediocrity can only be achieved through hard work.
Advertising has a large unconscious component; anyone who has lived in this modern world for any stretch of time knows that. This is just the first time (probably not even) that it's been documented with medical evidence. Advertisers have been researching the psychological effects of color, motion, music, and so on for decades; it's no surprise they'd eventually switch to modern instruments instead of having focus groups respond verbally or in writing.
It seems that technology is becoming more and more...invasive is the wrong word, never the less its the only one that comes to mind. There are so few area's of life that have not been affected by technology. This is another example of how wide spread and diversified technology has become. I'll reserve my judgement on whether this is a good or a bad thing, but to much dependance on anything is never a good thing.
Lines of thinking that lead to Terminator style future scenarios are probably paranoid on my part but at this point in time a technological failure on a widespread basis would cripple not just the US economy but economies world wide. It's part of the price that we pay for globalization.
I've got bad news for the marketting people out there -- they waste a lot more than half their marketing budget. I bet 90% of the advertisements I see are completely useless to me.
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..
Most importantly, what does brain state tell us about behavior, if anything?
For most men, nothing. You really need to be looking a little further south for the control center.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
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.
fMRI doesn't tell you what neurons do with any spatial or temporal accuracy.
See this paper:
The authors find that:
* fMRI gives you a really strong signal in the blood vessels
* Less than 50% of the time, when you average the neural activity over several SECONDS (an action potential lasts 0.015s), and over 1 cubic CENTIMETER (containing 10^8 neurons), fMRI tells you something about that average activity. Only problem is: we know that this averaging can work in SI, the brain area studied in the paper. For other brain areas, who knows?
Not to mention the issues with statistics in fMRI.
There are a very few groups doing good MRI studies, e.g. Heeger, Boynton, but they study humans doing relatively simple things.
Marketing is NOT simple. Marketing + fMRI = crap.
This is my general take on the technology too, and I've done some work with it also.
I see it as much like the mapping of the genome. It gets at the basics but we still don't know much about how the basic building blocks interact. The basic building blocks are the easy part. The interactivity, and non-linear relationship between things is where we don't even have a clue. And that's far more complex than the scratching of the surface we're doing right now.
Its PET or fMRI for functional scans. If i understand it correctly with MRI there are two clear advantages over PET scanners:
1. no radio-active agent is needed, and
2. the radiologists get the functional as well as the anotomical details- the flesh and its function, to say vulgalrly.
With the latest 3D imaging tools available with diagnostic machines its easy for the neuro-surgeons to plan the surgeries to much better detail.
Marketing is another issue. Obviously the customers are either radiologists or neuro-surgoens. The two people are tuned to their professional habits. It would be hard for the marketing/sales people to cause the change. My opinion is that companies need a pack of very good application-specialists. Application-specialists are breed of people who not only understand how the phased-array coils work but can also explain the C, T and L spine to the radiologists with equivalent ease! So maybe the diagnostic companies focus on their applicaiton-specialists instead of wasting too much on ads etc. Pure marketing/sales skills will not be enough for such a specialized tool.
Voltaire: God is dead.
God: Voltaire is dead!
What's more, the brain activity of the subjects was now different. There was also activity in the medial prefrontal cortex, an area of the brain that scientists say governs high-level cognitive powers. Apparently, the subjects were meditating in a more sophisticated way on the taste of Coke, allowing memories and other impressions of the drink -- in a word, its brand -- to shape their preference.
Note the bias here in the interpretation of the results. The eliciting of a stronger response in more primitive areas of the brain - which Pepsi reportedly does when neither is named - is viewed as the more objective reality. While a response which involves higher areas of the brain which are concerned with the aesthetics of it is just a matter of "brand." Further, there's the implication that when the higher areas of aesthetic appreciation are active we're being more manipulated by brand, and missing the reality, as defined by the most primitive reaction, which could well be based on Pepsi having a sweeter taste.
In all likelihood a splotch of bright red will have a stronger reaction from primitive brain areas than will a fine landscape painting (we're strongly programmed to respond to red since it's often a sign of blood and danger). By the logic of this researcher (at least as reported by the Times) our considered preference for the landscape painting over the splotch of bright red is a sort of manipulation by the brand "landscape painting," or perhaps the brandname of the painter. While there's some small degree of truth to this, isn't it largely back asswards?
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
Off topic my ass.
Watch the movie. It's 100% relevant to the topic. It's prophetic.
It's not a T&A movie as the shallow of mind would think, it's about mind control and marketing. The use computer generated models combined with mind controlling embedded signals to not only compell people to buy things they don't want/need they end up using the same technique to convince people to vote for a faux presidential candidate.
Jeez people, can't you ever use your minds to see through the bling-bling to see the underlying message??
EVERY movie made sends a message. Most are contrived to form opinions and mold minds. Commercials are no different.
Commercials are attempts to control your mind and secure your soul..
THINK!!!
I suspect you're right, though really we're only talking about a couple hundred thousand years of evolution. Homo species prior to Sapiens probably didn't have the kind of symbolic processing ability that would make such linguistic or visual appeals, or the the ability to resist them, evolutionarily important, even if they had language, which is also under question. And in any case, the combined Homo and Austro primate branches have only been around for about 5 (+/- 1) million years.
However, let's say that a technique that can be shown to influence peoples buying and desire patterns, with a mechanism that can be adequately understood outside of statistical correlation (such as a visual-linguistic technique that provokes desire for an object through creating a dopaminic/serotonal cascade in a portion of the brain) exists and is discovered.
In that case, I expect one of two things would occur:
These constraints might compel researchers in the field to avoid explaining, or even looking for an explanation of, how the effect actually works. Instead, they'll probably just identify certain correlations in focus groups between MRI results and patterns of desire and consumption (buying).
I wonder what would happen to such people. Would they be better paid than individuals in your typical focus group? After all, going through the MRI process would be far more intrusive, tedious, and time-consuming than sitting around a table answering questions.
What would happen to people who exposed themselves to such testing on a repeated basis? Would they become obsessives or fetishists, like the characters who went through SB-5 trials in William Gibson's "Idoru" and "All Tomorrow's Parties"? Given the amount of TV most people watch, would we accidentally create a society of such obsessives? Would MRI comparisons, between people who watch TV on a regular basis and people who don't, show that we've already created such a society?
Hmm, if nothing else, it could make for a good SF novel. But then, I suppose Neil Stephenson's "Snow Crash" has already covered some of this territory.
Firstly, you can't have a "stronger" or "higher" or "larger" fMRI response - the most you can have is a larger probability that the signal you are reading in a particular region of the brain is not due to chance but to manipulation of your experimental variable (in this case, the drink being drunk). A comparison between two such probabalistic values (in the article, the degree of 'activation' in the ventral putamen) is pretty much meaningless. The experiment also doesn't control for the possibility that more people in the sample just prefer Coke (at least, from the information given in the article, this is the implication). One of my supervisors was approached a couple of years ago by a film distributor, who wanted to show fMRI pictures of someone just sitting, versus someone reading a book, versus someone watching a film - the desired effect being, of course, to show that films recruit more of the brain. Duh! It would have worked, and been a legitimate thing to do - but they wanted it in a matter of days (and with pretty pictures too!) - this stuff takes time, at least with our facilities it does. So, no deal. In terms of whether fMRI and similar techniques tell you anything ... hmm. Kinda. But results are consistently over-interpreted by many in the scientific community, and as has been pointed out in other posts, fMRI measures local blood flow, not neuronal activity (blood flow, by the way, can be influenced by a variety of factors, such as caffeine, which is a vasodilator ... so if either Coke or Pepsi contained more caffeine than the other, that could partially account, potentially, for differential fMRI results)
And don't even start me on using functional imaging techniques as "lie-detectors" ...
There's a long way to go, and anyone who says different really IS selling something.
Mod early, mod often.