Turning to the Human Brain for More Accurate Market Research

Chris Crum — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 13:27:44 +0000

Neuromarketing is a fascinating area of marketing that we don’t discuss very often, but can provide some quite useful information to those willing to pay for the research. WebProNews recently talked with Roger Dooley, President of consultancy firm Dooley Direct and author of the Neuromarketing blog, about some of tactics used, the information they can provide to marketers, and some of the concerns about such practices.

As Dooley points out, neuromarketing research is usually sought out more by larger companies who can afford the bills that come with it, but he does often offer tips to smaller marketers on his blog.

"Neuromarketing is any use of brain science in marketing," explains Dooley. "There’s really two parts to that. There’s the really technical part of neuromarketing that involves brain scans, putting people in fMRI machines or attaching EEG caps to their heads – measuring what’s going on in their brain, and then interpreting that data to see how they respond to advertising and other marketing materials. For instance, you can watch a person’s reaction to a television commercial while monitoring their brain activity, and then conclude that the ad was effective because it seemed to engage their emotions or they tuned out."

"But to me, perhaps the more interesting side, at least from a practical application standpoint for small and medium business, is a behavioral science, and there’s a lot of work that’s ongoing in understanding why people do things that one wouldn’t predict that they would do, and how in fact it’s often irrational," he says. "It seems irrational, the decisions that people make…"

Will Focus Group Become Obsolete?

"I think the focus group is going to be a thing of the past because of neuromarketing," Dooley tells us. "The problem is that a focus group is typically just asking people what they think about a product. Would they buy it? What do they like about it? And it’s not really getting into their subconscious at all, and the results may be misleading. Often times people can’t really describe why they do something, and they may not provide accurate information about what they would do in the future, such as purchase the product."

"I use the comparison to an iceberg, where about 88% of the iceberg’s mass is below the surface, and there are all kinds of estimates for how much of our decision making process is subconscious," he continues. "About the best one is sort of a middle-of-the-road guess at 95%. So basically, the vast majority of of mental processes and our decision-making are not part of our conscious awareness. That’s the area that neuromarketing hopes to tap into, and as a result, give better information than a focus group or questionnaire or an interview."

How it’s Done

"You have the brain scan approach, which is sort of bypassing even asking people anything and just seeing how they react," he adds. "There’s another technique, not widely used, but it’s interesting – called facial coding, and basically an expert in reading facial expressions monitors people’s reactions including a word called microexpressions – these are like fleeting little expression changes that a normal observer wouldn’t even notice, but a trained observer can see, and again, they use this to see if a person is watching a television commercial – how are they reacting emotionally. Maybe they’re showing a social smile – trying to be pleasant – but during one part of the commercial, there’s sort of a fleeting disgust reaction – that’s what they’re trying to see using that technique."

"In the whole field of behavioral research, scientists devise relatively simple experiments to see how people react," explains Dooley. "One very simple example is in a bar, a waiter was actually a grad student doing research, and he offered people free beer samples, and there were four beers, and what they found was that if the people at the table were each given all four choices on a slip of paper, where they could mark it, they would choose the one they wanted, but interestingly in almost every case if they simply went around the table asking, each person would choose a different beer, even the last person would choose the least desirable sounding beer. It’s a trivially simple experiment, but it teaches us something about how people make decisions."

Concerns

Of course anything that deals with marketing and looking at the human brain is bound to draw some concern from some people.

"There are some concerns about privacy and whether this is somehow unethical, but in general, those concerns are misplaced or overblown because the folks who have those concerns don’t really understand the technology," says Dooley. "There is no real mind reading that goes on – not in the conventional sense that you could read somebody’s thoughts."

"And it’s not possible to develop ‘super ads’," he adds. "That’s one of the fears – that somehow using these technologies – that Madison Avenue will suddenly begin cranking out ads that turn consumers into buying drones, and that’s simply not going to happen. We’ve had superb advertising for many decades, and that hasn’t happened yet, even by accident, so it’s very unlikely that even with some better market research data from brain scans that there’s really going to be any more success in that. So ‘super ads’ aren’t a concern."

There are also concerns that marketers will abuse the technologies and even make people buy things they wouldn’t otherwise buy. "The other popular concept is that there is a buy button in the brain that somehow marketers can push, and again, the decision-making process is far more complex than that," says Dooley. "There is no single ‘buy button’. Every decision involves different areas of the brain that are being pulled in different directions by varying factors like cost, health concerns, and many other concerns in the consumer’s mind, so there really isn’t anything to fear."

He also says the neuromarketing companies out there don’t work with child subjects, which may alleviate other concerns.

What are your thoughts on the practices of neuromarketing?

Google Measuring Brain Waves

WebProNews Staff — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 15:21:53 +0000

There’ve been a lot of disturbing news in advertising this year and this week, all of it involving brain stuff. Thankfully, Google’s not manipulating our thoughts—yet.

But the company has been experimenting with YouTube ads by reading brain waves to see how people respond to them. Garett Rogers sat in on a webcast hosted by Google’s Leah Spalding and MediaVest’s Yaakov Kimelfield.

Spalding and Kimelfield revealed the results of a study that employed “neuromarketing” (we’ll get to that in a minute) firm NeuroFocus “to measure the impact of YouTube overlay advertisements on attention levels, emotional engagement, and other psychological metrics.”

They decided YouTube overlay ads were effectively compelling and improved positive brand response. Why is Google, previously primarily focused on click-through rates, so interested in brain waves suddenly? Spalding says it’s about how memorable an ad is and its impact, and how important it is to “look beyond” the click through.

Beyond the click through. . .beyond the click through. . .Where have I heard that before? Oh yeah, it was in my editorial title back in March 2007. Toot, toot, my own horn, toot toot.

Granted, this neuromarketing business isn’t on the same level as actually making messages sound inside someone’s head like a thought, or erasing individual memories, but it is a little spooky. Earlier this week Martin Lindstrom was all over the media landscape promoting his book buy-ology, making the term neuromarketing a much wider known phrase.

In part, neuromarketing study involves functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and electroencephalography (EEG) to study how the brain reacts to different stimuli. Knowing this information is thought to shed light on how the subconscious brain operates and how it affects the conscious brain. While there are no doubt countless applications for this, advertisers are jumping on the neuro-wagon in order to take the guess-work out of branding. Some things hit and some things miss and over the history of advertising no one has known why, or at least no one has known in advance.

Neuromarketing aims to solve that problem, likely making all of us slaves to the corporate machine in the process. But that’s a bit conspiratorial, I suppose. After all, is it harmful to know that Coke sells better than Pepsi based on wildly effective branding and not on taste?

Well, I guess if we’re only talking soda pop, eh?

If this is a topic that interests you, this explanation of the three layers of brain—the reptilian, mammalian, and the human—should spark some Stephen King-like eeriness. Like the best kind of red head, fascinating and a little scary.

WebProNews » Neuromarketing

Turning to the Human Brain for More Accurate Market Research

Google Measuring Brain Waves