Neuromarketing: Towards a better understanding ofconsumer behavior

Keshav Bhatia

Assistant Professor, GL Bajaj Institute of Management &Research

AbstractIn recent years, long-standing science, advanced technology, andcomplex management have come to a common ground that researchersand marketers are able to map science to marketing.Neuromarketing is an important development in the field ofunderstanding how the subconscious mind helps the consumer totake decisions. Marketers sublimely attract the customer towardstheir product. For this ground breaking research has taken placein various areas of studying the human brain. Innovation intechniques is taking place by neuroscientists, and the field ofneuroscience is being tapped into extensively. Consumer behavioris impacted creatively so that the customer gravitates towardsthe desired product. Neuromarketing is expected to be usedextensively by marketers as knowledge about this grows.Neuromarketing is believed to provide more accurate insight intopeople’s psychological reactions to these stimuli and, hence,their actions in buying situations because people can’t alwaysverbalize their feelings and thoughts in accurate, unambiguousways.

Key words: Neuromarketing, Consumer Behaviour, Marketing,Research, Neuroscience, Advertising, Emotions, Decision Making,Body language,

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Neuroscience:The application of neuroscience to marketing has gained increasingpopularity over the last decade. The birth of the nascent field ofconsumer neuroscience generated wide–ranging, ongoing debates whatbenefits they take. (Ariely & Berns, 2010, Ariely et al 2005, Kenning& Plasmann 2008; Lee, Broderick & Chamberliain, 2007)

It is worth noting, that the term neuroscience, while used regularlyin this field, is too broad for the study of consumer behavior. Aprimary and critical distinction is between “consumer neuroscience”should be understood as the scientific study of biological bases ofcognitive and affective processes underlying consumer behavior.

A primary, and critical distinction is between “consumer neuroscience,which refers to academic research at the intersection of neuroscience,psychology and marketing” and “Neuromarketing, which refers topractitioner and popular interest in neurophysiologicaltools-such as eye tracking, skin conductance, electroencephalography(EEG) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)”- to conductcompany specific market research. Neuromarketing has receivedconsiderable attention in the corporate world.

Neuroscience is in general the study of the nervous system. Neurologydenotes the study of brain disorders and their effect on cognition,emotion and behaviour. We should divide in “cognitive neuroscience”and “affective neuroscience”. Cognitive neuroscience describes thescientific study of biological substrates of cognition (attention,memory, problem solving) and affective neuroscience is the study ofthe brain bases of emotions and feelings. Together they imply“consumer neuroscience”. Neuromarketing refers more to thepractitioner and popular interest and uses for example: eye tracking,skin conductance and fMRI -functional magnetic resonance imaging.

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The term Neuromarketing refers to the use of modern brain scienceto measure the impact of marketing and advertising on consumers.For decades, marketers have sought to understand what consumerswere thinking, but they’ve relied on traditional techniques —asking them what they thought in focus groups and surveys.

Neuromarketing techniques are based on scientific principlesabout how humans really think and decide which involves brainprocesses that our conscious minds aren’t aware of. When combinedwith sound experimental designs and procedures, these newtechniques provide insights into consumer decisions and actionsthat are invisible to traditional market research methodologies.

The word Neuromarketing, as the field is popularly known, wasfirst coined by Ale Smidts in 2002. It studies consumers'sensorimotor, cognitive, and affective response to marketingstimuli. Researchers use technologies such as functional magneticresonance imaging (fMRI) to measure changes in activity in partsof the brain, electroencephalography (EEG) to measure activity inspecific regional spectra of the brain response, and sensors tomeasure changes in one's physiological state, in terms of heartand respiratory rate, galvanic skin response etc. Organizationsare keen to learn why consumers make the decisions they do, andwhat part of the brain is telling them to do it

Marketing analysts will use Neuromarketing to better measure aconsumer's preference, as the verbal response given to thequestion and it will tell the marketeer what the consumer reactsto, whether it was the colour of the packaging, the sound the boxmakes when shaken, or the idea that they will have somethingtheir co-consumers do not, explained Krishna, whose doctoral workwas supported by Cambridge Nehru Scholarship.

Malcolm Gladwell in his celebrated book “Blink: The Power ofThinking Without Thinking”(2005) draws on examples from fields ofscience, sales, advertising, medicine and music to accentuate hisidea of “thin-slicing”- a concept that some mental processes workrapidly and automatically from relatively little information.3 | P a g e

Author and marketing guru Martin Lindstorm’s bestselling book“Buyology - Truth and Lies About Why We Buy” (2008) claims fromhis experimental studies that subconscious mind plays a majorrole in people’s buying decisions. Psychologist Daniel Kahneman,2002 Nobel Prize winner for Economics, in his book "Thinking,Fast and Slow"(2011) throws light on the ways in which we makechoices—most often, automatically and not necessarily in linewith their best intentions. The authors seem to be mystifiedwhile the marketers still try to unravel the gap between theconsumer intention and action.

As said in a Forbes article, Neuromarketing is about making theintent-action gap visible in a consumer, showing how differentparts of the brain are made to take part by cues such as branding(for example, Coke vs. Pepsi) or by facing a spend-or-save choicebetween whether to indulge for pleasure now or delaygratification for some later date. While neuroscience has beenaround for decades, it is only recently that it became part ofthe marketing parlance.

The development of the field of Neuromarketing depends on growinginterest in the neurosciences associated with the development ofnew brain imaging technology and recent theorizations of the roleplayed by emotion in consumer decision making. Neuromarketersassert that people's bodies are, for marketing purposes, moretruthful than the words they utter, promising direct access toformerly concealed aspects of consumer desire. This articlesituates the promise to bypass the vagaries of discourse withtechniques for reading the body within the broader context of achanging information environment and the forms of reflexiveawareness of the partial and constructed character of narrativeforms of representation. It explores the uptake by neuromarketersof recent theories that posit emotional responses as integral tothe process of rational decision making. This uptake repositionsmarketers as adjuncts to rational deliberation rather thanthreats to it and the forms of autonomy and citizenship withwhich it is associated. However, the article argues thatneuromarketers’ claims to bypass mediation and the impasses of

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representation break down upon further examination. In the end,an examination of the recent literature on the topic indicatesthat neuromarketers – like data miners – are more interested inpotentially useful correlations than in underlying explanations.Their portrayal of Neuromarketing as a technique for accessingwhat consumers’ ‘really’ feel amounts to a misreading of theirown project, which might be more properly understood as thedevelopment of techniques for making probabilistic predictionsabout the behaviour of populations.

Where it is being usedNeuromarketing is not a new kind of marketing — it’s a new way tostudy marketing, so it’s part of the field of market research.Here are six major areas where Neuromarketing is being usedtoday:

Branding: Brands are ideas in the mind that draw strengthfrom the connections they make. Neuromarketing providespowerful techniques for measuring brand associations.

Product design and innovation: Neuromarketing can measureconsumer responses to product ideas and package designs thatare largely automatic, emotional, and outside our consciousawareness.

Advertising effectiveness: Much advertising impacts usthrough nonconscious means, even though we don’t think itdoes. Neuromarketing explains how.

Shopper decision making: Neuromarketing shows how storeenvironments directly influence how shoppers decide and buy,and it’s not a logical process.

Online experiences: The online world provides new challengesto our old brains. Brain science shows the many ways we canbe subtly influenced as we go about our online activities.

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Entertainment effectiveness: Entertainment createsexperiences in people’s minds that can influence attitudes,preferences, and actions. Neuromarketing shows what happenswhen entertainment transports us into an imaginary world.

How it works:Neuromarketing involves application of cognitive neurosciences inthe field of marketing and marketing research. It uses a brainmapping medical technology known as fMRI (Functional MagneticResonance Imaging) to study blood flow and blood oxygenation inthe neuron activity of consumers at the time of selecting andbuying a product. Though it started with the application ofneurosciences, over the years it gained entry into thetraditional methods of doing marketing research. As researchproceeded, it was applied to promote sales and researchorganizations such as Bright House Institute was set up to servecorporations eager to reap the nascent developments in the field.

Branding expert Dr Peter Steidl says Neuromarketing will change theface of marketing, and without it, campaigns will lag behindcompetitors that have embraced this new way of thinking aboutconsumer behaviour and branding. He is not talking about lab tests that deliver reliable but limitedinformation about how consumers process marketing stimuli such asads, logos or package designs.  Rather, he is referring to theapplication of neuroscience concepts in a strategic context. Inother words, how marketers can benefit from the latest insightsinto how consumers think, feel and, and most importantly, makepurchase decisions.The application of neuroscience lifts the effectiveness ofmarketing, brand, communications, shopper marketing, pricing andinnovation strategies – including, of course, social and otherdigital media strategies.6 | P a g e

Brief overviews on three important neuroscience insights,highlighting a number of important marketing implications are asfollows:

Insight 1: Consumers have two parallel circuits in their mind, onefor thinking and one for doingNobel Prize Laureate Daniel Kahneman simply called them System 1and System 2, although marketers may want to think about thesecircuits as the consumer’s ‘doing’ and ‘thinking’ minds,respectively.In System 1, the person’s non-conscious ‘doing’ mind, we findmemories of past sensory stimulations (such as ads, purchase andconsumption experiences, word-of-mouth, etc), emotions, rules ofthumb, stereotypes, archetypes, associations, visual images,spontaneous behaviour (such as impulse or habitual buying),intuition, non-verbal communications and more.Harvard professor Gerald Zaltman suggests that 95% of purchasedecisions are made by the non-conscious ‘doing’ mind.System 2, the person’s conscious ‘thinking’ mind, facilitatesthinking by providing working memory to process verbal messages, toevaluate the cost-benefit of options, and to plan ahead (eg.preparing a supermarket shopping list). This is the system thatresponds in surveys and group discussions when consumers try toexplain why they do the things they do.The ‘doing’ mind is fast and powerful and can do millions of thingsconcurrently.  Importantly, the ‘doing’ mind decides which of thebillions of sensory inputs the brain receives will be stored inmemory. To do this, the ‘doing’ mind has to assign meaning andvalue to these inputs, as it has to decide which existing memoriesthe new memories are to be linked to.The ‘thinking’ mind, in contrast, is slow and can only focus on onetask at a time.Not surprisingly then, to be successful marketers typically have tomake an impact on the ‘doing’ mind that is driving most purchasedecisions.Here are just three important implications:First, System 1 marketing – marketing activity aiming at theconsumer’s non-conscious ‘doing’ mind – is of particular importancewhen consumers are: repeat buying,7 | P a g e

buying something that is not of great importance to them, are under time pressure, suffering from information overload, not particularly interested in the matter, and unsure how to decide (eg. in a situation of commoditisation or

complexity). These criteria apply to the majority of purchases consumers arelikely to make during their lifetime.Second, measuring the effectiveness of advertising and othermarketing initiatives on the basis of recall, stated purchaseintentions, or statements about how the campaign has changed howconsumers feel about the brand is not just unreliable butpotentially misleading. The fact is, consumers do not know what ishappening in their non-conscious ‘doing’ mind, yet that’s where thesuccess or failure of your campaign is being decided!Third, don’t project the likelihood of consumers buying your newproduct on the basis of group discussions or interviews. Consumerssimply don’t know what they will do – that’s why 85% of newproducts fail, despite having been researched in group discussionsand surveys. Insight 2: The brain is designed to avoid thinking by usingshortcuts to make purchase decisionsThe ‘doing’ mind influence extends even further. Having beendesigned to help us survive in a hostile natural environment, the‘doing’ mind has developed energy preservation strategies. And asthe brain – which accounts for only some 3% of body weight –accounts for approximately 20% of all energy consumed, the ‘doing’mind seems to have focused on finding ingenious decision shortcutsthat eliminate the need for thinking.These shortcuts are typically presented under the heading ofbehavioural economics and include priming and a wide range ofjudgment heuristics. Here are some examples: Encourage consumers to first buy fruit and vegetables on their

supermarket shopping trip and they will spend more on packaged goodsbecause of the feel-good factor,

the sound of a cork coming out of a bottle and wine being poured into aglass, played in a bottle shop, will lift wine sales. Similarly, a very

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faint lemon smell in a restaurant will boost seafood sales – but only incultures where seafood is often served with a slice of lemon, 

too much choice is likely to lead to the consumer withdrawingaltogether, (ie. not buying at all),

if you want to sell a triple patty burger, put a five patty burger onthe menu. Or, like The Economist, The Age newspaper and undoubtedly manyothers have done, introduce a subscription category that makes the one youwant to actually sell more attractive, and

when going through the specifications of a new car with a buyer you willsell more features when starting with a fully specified model and ask thebuyer to take options off to reduce the price, rather than the usualapproach of adding options to the base model.

 There are literally hundreds, if not thousands, of case studiesillustrating how the non-conscious mind drives consumers down theroute of shortcuts by triggering judgment heuristics or by simplyletting primes drive the purchase behaviour.Consumers using these shortcuts often display irrational behaviourbut while this behaviour may be irrational it is predictable,because the majority of consumers will react in similar ways when ajudgment heuristic is activated or a marketer has primed theirdecision. Insight 3: the marketer’s challenge is to shape the consumer’sbrand memory a marketer needs to invest into developing a positive, emotionallystrong brand memory that is linked to one or more of the consumer’sgoals. However, current practice is often not aligned with thisprinciple.Especially when it comes to social media many marketers believethey have a success on their hands when they look at thousands,possibly millions, of ‘likes’, views, comments and so forth –ignoring the fact that these may relate to the promotional exposurerather than to the brand itself.Take ‘Dumb Ways to Die’, the most awarded advertising campaignever, which was supposed to reduce the number of significant safetyincidents associated with the Melbourne rail system. It enjoyed amassive number of downloads, viral sharing, likes and so forth –but the safety statistics in the first six months after thecampaign broke showed the worst performance for a decade. Clearly,

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the advertisement created an advertisement memory, but this admemory was not linked to the memory of how to behave.Similarly, there are numerous examples of viral and social mediacampaigns that engaged a large number of consumers but did not havea material impact on sales.  The reason: the ad memory was notlinked in the consumer’s mind to the brand memory.It is important to ensure at all touch points that the brand playsa central, emotionally engaging role. If that’s not the case, youmay get consumers involved but they won’t end up buying your brand. Summary of key pointsAdopting a neuroscience perspective it can be said that theprinciple task is not marketing management, but memory management.The non conscious ‘doing Mind’ is responsible for screening sensoryinputs including ads, visual images such as logos, product orpackage designs, emotions, consumption experiences and so forth,and deciding what to place into memory.  To do that, it must assignvalue and meaning to the sensory inputs to be able to link newmemories to appropriate established memories.Sensory inputs may trigger judgment heuristics and prime thedecision-making process, which again is a process that takes placein the consumer’s non-conscious ‘doing’ mind.Whether the purchase decision is  impulse or habitual ordeliberate, it is clear that even for considered purchase decisionsthe non conscious mind has most likely shaped these decisionsthrough heuristics and primes.It follows that marketers need to know how to trigger judgmentheuristics, how to prime consumers and, most importantly, how tomake sure touchpoints result in memories that carry the desiredqualities. Most importantly, ‘touchpoint’ memories have to belinked to the brand memory to impact on purchase decisions.The good news is that applying neuroscience insights in marketingis neither complicated nor difficult. It is just a matter ofintegrating our understanding of how consumers think, feel and makedecisions with well-established marketing concepts and tactics tolift their effectiveness.

History of Neuromarketing

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The term “Neuromarketing” was coined by Ale Smidts in 2002, amarketing professor at Erasmus University in Rotterdam, theNetherlands. But there is a more interesting story about thepublic attention to the term. Throughout the 70’s and 80’s blindtaste tests had shown that Pepsi was the winner when consumerswere told to choose between Pepsi and Coke without knowing whichone they were consuming. Dr. Read Montague, a neuroscientist, washowever intrigued by the fact that in spite of these results,Coke dominated the market. Montague decided to repeat the testswith fMRI in what was known as The Pepsi Challenge, 2003. Theresults were astonishing. He found that when blind folded,consumers liked the taste of Pepsi but when the names wererevealed three fourth of them switched loyalty to Coke. It wasobserved that the knowledge that they were drinking Cokeincreased activity in the medial pre-frontal cortex, an area ofthe brain associated with thinking and judging. The experimentshowed that while people liked something in their subconsciousbrain they express something else. The example became a classicto be used later on in marketing case studies worldwide.

From The Pepsi Challenge, 2003 it was brought out that brand andimage could affect the customer’s choices more than the product.This encouraged neuromarketers to use the neuro-imagingtechniques to identify decision making triggers among shoppers tohelp companies directly click the “buy button” on the customer’sbrain to boost sales.

Techniques Used in Neuromarketing:Neuromarketers use technologies such as EEG(electroencephalography) and fMRI (functional magnetic resonanceimaging), which have been traditionally used by doctors andresearchers to study neuropsychological disorders. Othertechnologies like MEG (magnetoencephalography) and TMS(transcranial magnetic stimulation) may also enter the market inthe near future. While EEG and fMRI devices differ greatly incost, appearance, and mode of operation, they both read brain11 | P a g e

activity in near-real time. They are said to provide a deeperunderstanding of consumers’ emotions and preferences thantraditional market research modalities—surveys and focusgroups. Although generally expensive, it is pregnant with thepromise to fully understand consumers’ decision making processwhile shopping.

fMRI – an acronym of functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging is atechnology which uses basic Physics and Biology. It uses apowerful magnet and radio waves to create high resolution imageof the living brain.  It draws on the fact that the Red BloodCells(RBC) in the blood contain iron in the oxygen- carrying-part of the hemoglobin and these atoms create distortions in themagnetic field around them. While any part of the brain becomesactive, the blood vessels in the specific region dilate causingmore blood to flow in that region to supply the additional oxygenand glucose required by the more active brain cells to do theirwork. This large amount of freshly oxygenated blood in to theregion causes a small change in the magnetic field.

The result is displayed as a patchy area of colour, amidst thehigh resolution grey background of the brain. The coloured arearepresents the active region as opposed to the grey backgroundwhich represents the inactive region of the brain. Armed withsuch high-resolution 3D  images of the brain on a real timebasis, one can pinpoint exactly which part of the brain isactive.

This area-specific knowledge plays a significant role in theutility of fMRI. Several parts of our brain work together. Evenas you read this article, the connectomes related to your visualsense along with the ones responsible for reading andunderstanding the material are working.  Each region with a richintermesh of neurons is responsible for a certain activity. Themore you stress on any activity, the more the work done by thatpart of the brain and more the blood flow in that region. Theinteresting part is, the region responsible for each activity iswell demarcated in the human brain. While the whole brain is yet

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to be mapped by scientists, yet various centres of the brain arealready known for various though processes such as reward centre,face-recognition centre, self-referencing centre, liking centre,anticipation centre etc.

Neuromarketing uses a variety of tools and techniques to measureconsumer responses and behavior. These include everything fromrelatively simple and inexpensive approaches, such as eye tracking(measuring eye gaze patterns), analyzing facial expressions, andbehavioral experiments (for example, seeing how changes in productdisplays affect a consumer’s choices), to more complex, sensor-basedapproaches, including biometrics (body signal measures) that measureperspiration, respiration, heart rate, and facial muscle movement(electromyography [EMG]), as well as neurometrics (brain signal measures)that measure electrical activity (electroencephalography [EEG]), andblood flow (functional magnetic resonance imaging [fMRI]) in thebrain.

So how is Neuromarketing implemented in real life? Starting with,say the fMRI scanners(other technologies are used too), theconsumer’s brain is scanned which help the neuromarketers to findout how consumers react subconsciously to advertising, brand andproducts. This will tell the neuromarketers what the consumerreacts to, whether it was the shape of the packaging, the colourof the packet, the sound the box makes when shaken, and so on.This rare ability to watch inside the mind of consumers andnoting how sensory inputs like image, smell and touch culminateto reach decisions enables the advertisers and marketers tooptimise their advertisement, campaigns and product or servicefeatures to make them more acceptable. fMRI is not the onlytechnology that is used. While fMRI is chiefly used for refiningthe product attributes, Electroencephalography (EEG) measuresfluctuations in response to advertisements,Magnetoencephalography (MEG) measures the fluctuations but withgreater accuracy than EEG and Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation(TMS) is used to measure causal roles.

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It should be noted that Neuromarketing is not exactly the same assubliminal marketing. The latter is only a subset of the former andfocussed on the application part as implemented by the marketers.Neuromarketing involves much more such as involving the test subjects,using the biometric and physiological sensors to carry outexperiments, studying the brain‖s reaction (sometimes also heart rate,breathing, and skin response) to the social triggers and so on.Application in the real world to boost sales or acceptability (say, ofpresidential speech) is the end result of Neuromarketing. An importantpart of Neuromarketing which is more related to subliminal messagingis “priming” which refers to subtle suggestions made deliberately tothe subconscious mind, without the subject’s knowing, which couldinfluence his/her subsequent behaviour.

GSR

Galvanic skins response is a method of measuring the electrical conductance of the skin, which varies with its moisture level. This is of interest because the sweat glands are controlled by the sympathetic nervous system so skin conductance is used as an indication of psychological or physiological arousal. Therefore, if the sympathetic branch of the autonomic nervous system is highly aroused, then sweat gland activity will also increase, which in turn increases skin conductance. In this way, skin conductance can be used as a measure of emotional and sympatheticresponses.

Companies that have used Neuromarketingtechniques:Remember the recent success of PSY’s music video Gangnam Style? Thesong was released in July 2012 and on December 21, 2012, GangnamStyle, became the first online video to record a billion hits on theInternet and is still the most watched video on the net. Marcelo

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Peruzzo, Chief Brain Officer of Brazil based Neuromarketing companyipdois neurobusiness, decided to conduct a Neuromarketing research andmeasure the viewers’ reactions while watching this video, in order togain more insights on what exactly made this video so popular. Heasked 20 women and 20 men to watch Gangnam Style while researchersfrom ipdois neuro-business measured their reactions. They used eyetracking of viewers’ eye movements, galvanic skin responses to measurethe muscular excitement level and facial coding to understand theemotions of those seeing the video. Using facial recognition software,it was proven that most viewers experienced happiness, sadness andsurprise while watching the video, while disgust, anger and fear wereinsignificant – proving the power of attraction of the video. Peruzzoalso found that many of the scenes stimulate the limbic system.

Various companies had adopted the services of Neuromarketingresearch organizations successfully in the last decade. Theyinclude, among others:

Hyundai asked for a Neuromarketing study having 30 men and womenin order to test a sporty silver model of 2011. The 15 men and 15women were asked to stare at specific parts of the vehicle,including the bumper, the windshield and the tires. Electrode-studded caps on their heads captured the electrical activity intheir brains as they viewed the car for an hour. Their brainactivity is supposed to show preferences that could lead topurchasing decisions. “We want to know what consumers think abouta car before we start manufacturing thousands of them,” says DeanMacko, manager of brand strategy at Hyundai Motor America. Mackoexpects the carmaker will tweak the exterior based on the EEGbrain activity reports. Hyundai thus used Neuromarketing inchanging exterior appearance of a car.

eBay, through its online payment company Paypal, usedNeuromarketing and found out that promoting speed in use of theirservice is more emotionally appealing for the consumer thanpromoting information security, as it did before.

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Microsoft   used Neuromarketing to gauge the effectiveness of someof its campaigns on the Xbox platform (how engaged gamers arewhen they use an Xbox). They wanted to get a clearer picture ofhow stimulated the brain was during 30 and 60-second TV adscompared with in-game ads run on the Xbox. While viewing TV adsfor an automotive brand, the most brain activity happened in thefirst half of the ad. However, when watching the Xbox Live viain-game advertising, brain activity peaked at the repeat image ofthe car, reinforcing the advertisement’s memorability,claims Microsoft. Ads that excite several parts of the brain aresupposed to make viewers more likely to go out and buy theproduct advertised.

Google used Neuromarketing in order to determine theeffectiveness of two forms of Internet advertising for YouTube(the pre-roll ad is between 10 and 15 seconds that occurs beforedisplaying any content, and InVideo or overlay consists ofoverlapping announced in content). They found that the overlay adsare more effective because the ads do not interfere with thecontent and the user does not leave the site, converting clicksinto sales.

Frito Lay tested their advertisements, products and packagingusing Neuromarketing. One study focused on the reactions of thewomen’s brains in order to find a way to be more attractive tothat market. The results showed a rejection to campaigns usingguilt, and women accepted the ones that were associated withhealth. They also found out that natural or matte colors andimages of healthy ingredients on their packaging did not motivatepurchase. They discovered that matte beige bags of potato chipspicturing potatoes and other “healthy” ingredients in the snackdon’t trigger activity in the anterior cingulate cortex – an areaof the brain associated with feelings of guilt – as much as shinybags with pictures of chips. Frito-Lay then switched out of shinypackaging in the USA. So they choosed bright packaging and imagesof frying. Finally, they concluded that some 30-second ads weremore effective than others of 60 seconds – this discoveryresulted in savings millions of dollars. Frito-Lay Chief

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Marketing Officer Ann Mukherjee says brain-imaging tests can bemore accurate than focus groups. Frito-Lay brain-tested acommercial that traditional focus groups panned. The spot forCheetos featured a woman taking revenge on someone in a Laundromatby putting the orange snack food in a dryer full of whiteclothes. Participants said they didn’t like the prank, probablybecause they didn’t want to look too mean-spirited to other focusgroup members. But EEG tests showed brain activity that suggestedwomen loved the advertisement. The snack-food marketer startedairing the prank ad early last year.

Mercedes-Benz Daimler used Neuromarketing for a campaign in whichthe fronts of cars were simulating human faces, linking directlyto the pleasure center of the brain. Sales rised with 12% in thefirst quarter.

Yahoo’s 60-second television commercial which shows happy anddancing people around the world was pre-tested with neurometricsin order to maximize the return on investment( Neuromarketing).Before rolling it out and spending money to air the advertisementon television and online, Yahoo had run it on EEG-cap-wearingconsumers. The brain waves from them showed stimulation in thelimbic system and frontal cortices of their brains, where memoryand emotional thought occurs. The advertisement surfaced inSeptember 2009 to attract more users to its search engine.

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Facebook researched how its ad system influences the unconsciousperceptions and emotions of individuals (neurologicalengagement).

Campbell‘s. On 17th Feb, 2010 an article in the Wall StreetJournal carried the caption “The Emotional Quotient of SoupShopping”. It dealt with how the Campbell soup company hadapplied Neuromarketing techniques in a two years study, intendingto get consumers to buy more soup. It drew a lot of publicattention at that time and encouraged debates on whether thestudies on skin moisture, heart-beat and biometric by Campbellsoup company was really worth it.  In the process, more than1,500 subjects were interviewed and tested using multiplemethodologies—ranging from traditional consumer feedback toNeuromarketing techniques.

The same subjects also participated in a deep interview processcalled ZMET (The Zaltman Metaphor Elicitation Technique) whichhelped the Campbell's team to contextualize the biometricmeasures that were used. According to the company itself, the endresults of the expensive Neuromarketing efforts offered manyinsights that the company needed to work on and which traditionalmethods could only partially arrive at. The alterations which,among others, included different colour packaging for differentlines of soup and a new logo proved beneficial for the company asit went to increase its bottom line. Also they redesigned theirsoup labels. They included a more contemporary soup, spoondisappeared and vapors were added, the key elements as the userperceives what he is looking for: a hot soup with flavour andaroma. They reduced the size of their logo, typography changedits type, size and color to be more pleasing to the eye and moreclear to the consumer mind 

20th Century FOX tests the trailers of their films, video games and

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advertisements in outdoor advertising campaigns using Neuromarketing.They found that saturation produces diminishing returns.

Unilever ice cream applied Neuromarketing and found that the icecauses greater pleasure than chocolate or yogurt.

Coca-Cola has their own in-house neuroscience lab, where theyuse neuroimaging techniques in real time while volunteer subjectswatch various commercials, using the scientific method and completelyunbiased neural responses to what the subjects are hearing and seeing.Ultimately, the scans spit out an arbitrary score, allowing the brandto choose which commercials, or even individual shots, are mosteffective in promoting their product.

More recent inductees such as Kimberly-Clark, Johnson & Johnsonare using three-dimensional computer simulations of both designsand store layouts along with eye-tracking technology to deducehow to improve sales.

Neuromarketing & Advertising ResearchNeuromarketing research can predict the effect of TV ads, evenbefore the commercial is made.

Effective TV commercials evoke a unique pattern of brainactivity, the scientists from Neurensics concluded after studyingover 150 commercials, including award-winning ads like Effies,humorous and even irritating ads. Functional magnetic resonanceimaging makes it possible to read what is going on in people’sbrains while seeing certain stimuli. By measuring emotions in thebrain of the consumer with an MRI-scanner, the researchersdiscovered a ‘neural signature’ that predicts how effective acommercial is with a stunning accuracy up to 82%.

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If you know how an effective commercial evokes activity in thebrain, you can also determine how effective a storyboard is tothe final production. This was the goal of a recently completedfollow-up study, which showed that indeed the same brain patternis activated when seeing storyboards and the final production.

The results are amazing! With a correlation of 80% between thestoryboard and final production, the researchers could seewhether the concepts had the effect promised by the creators. Thestudy additionally revealed something beneficial for advertisers:even simple storyboards, where the imagination of the consumer isput to the test, gave the same high correlation rate with thefinal production. For the first time in history, companies areable to test propositions and concepts in advertising withNeuromarketing techniques.

Using neuroscientific methods, researchers from Neurensics foundout why sometimes ads work, and sometimes don’t, being able tosee when viewers exhibited buying behavior.

The results indicated that each of the three categories caused aunique pattern in brain activity. The irritating commercials are,indeed, irritating – so much so that they trigger anger. Thefunny ads have an impact on the brain, attract attention and areoriginal and fun to watch. Accordingly, they stimulate primarilythe regions of the brain that process visual input. Finally,Effie selections have an average impact but excel at triggeringpositive emotions, while also defusing negative emotions.Researchers stated that this is because clearly effectivecommercials communicate their message in a concrete, appealingand rewarding manner. This is reflected in the increased activityin the auditory regions of the brain: people listen to Effies,and they receive very consistent scores.

Criticism & Implications for the Future

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Many people think Neuromarketing should be a highly regulatedfield. Gary Ruskin of Commercial Alert, a non-profit organizationthat works toward regulation of advertising in the USA, haslobbied Congress and the American Psychological Association aswell as threatened lawsuits against practitioners of the science.However, the government has chosen not to investigate thelawsuits and Congress and the APA have done nothing for his causeeither. Most people feel that because it is still in such apreliminary phase and because most marketers don't even know howto apply the results, it is not a threat.

Considering this new form of marketing research was only reallystarted in 2004, most opponents are worried about where theindustry might be in a few more years. Scientists have alreadymapped the entirety of the brain and know exactly what partslight up when we make the decision to buy a product in certainindustries. 

Despite the general positive light in which Neuromarketing isseen, one can not ignore the critics. Slate magazine’s sciencewriter Daniel Engber raised some serious doubts about theaccuracy of the results obtained by brain mapping and itsrelevance for marketers. He writes, “Scanning one individual’sbrain and drawing shaky conclusions proves nothing. A few peer-reviewed studies correlating fMRI predictions of ad effectivenesswith actual consumer purchases would mute the critics and do alot more for industry credibility than any number of glossyarticles that end up making Neuromarketing look like high-techphrenology.” There are other ethical and legal issues surroundingthe area as well. As the researchers around the world arestruggling to attain a go-ahead on issues like stem cell researchand cloning etc, it is very tough that attaching brain mappingdevices to someone’s brain for a purely commercial purpose willfind acceptance.

A recent research paper titled On the Feasibility of Side-ChannelAttacks with Brain Computer Interfaces uncovers potential21 | P a g e

security risks in the use of the consumer-grade EEG headsets. Inthis paper, a team of security researchers from Oxford, UCBerkeley and the University of Geneva have claimed that they wereable to deduce digits of PIN numbers, birth months, areas ofresidence and other personal information from 30 subjects whowere wearing consumer-grade EEG headsets and who were exposed toimages of ATM machines, debit cards, maps, people and randomnumbers in a series of experiments. Critics and researchers areeven concerned about a scenario where a potential maliciousattacker could write a brain spyware program, which could extractprivate information from the user. As imaging technologiesprogress and get coupled with powerful and futuristic software,threats will be bigger.

However Neuromarketing is not without its share of criticisms.While some groups claims that the research institutes areexploiting the corporate clients, some non-profit organizationsand customer advocacy groups maintained that the concept wasunethical, being intervening with the customer’s privacy whenpracticed without their knowledge. These groups have coined a newterm for this practice carried out by corporations, calling it“brandwashing”- from branding and brain washing.

Many research papers hold that the findings of fMRI are notrevelatory and only reconfirmed some rules that marketers hadknown intuitively. As for example, co-author Michael Deppe in hispaper “Bias-Specific Activity in the Ventromedial PrefrontalCortex during Credibility Judgments” (2005) says that whenconsumers faces credibility doubts, brand information played amajor role in decision making as seen by increasing activity inthe area of brain where attraction occurs. But brand loyalty wastraditionally always a factor on such occasions. Other concernsinclude that the benefits received might not outweigh the costincurred and the accuracy of the findings. Regarding the latter,critics assert that it is inexact science as body movements suchas breathing could distort or disrupt images and there aremultiple interpretations of a mapped image unless assumptions aretaken.

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Conclusion: The New Marketing Frontier?The field of Neuromarketing is still in its embryonic stage, butis developing with more and more new studies being conducted eachyear.

The utility of Neuromarketing is of course dependent on thedevelopment of Neuroscience. Our present day knowledge of thefunctioning of the ‘neuronal geography’ in the brain is verysimilar to the late eighteenth century map of the world, hand-drawn by cartographers.  However with more and more studies andthe development of sophisticated technologies like Brainbow,which can map individual neurons with 90 odd fluorescent colours,we might soon have the ‘Google Earth’ of our brain. The analogyshows that the implications are tremendous. If a better knowledgeof the world geography was instrumental in colonizing half theplanet, imagine the immense possibility that Neuromarketing hasfor the marketers in influencing the consumers’ psyche.

References:http://essay.utwente.nl/65342/1/Roth_BA_MB.pdf

Measuring the Willingness to Purchase Using Methods ofNeuromarketingLaurea University of Applied Sciences, Leppävaara Unit2012 Vantaa

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Kenning, P., Ringelstein, E.B. (2005, Jul. 25). Evidence for aneural correlate of a framing effect: Bias-speci…c activity inthe ventromedial prefrontal cortex during credibility judgments.Brain Research Bulletin. Retrieved fromhttp://www.mydelphi.gr/uploads/bias-specific%20activity%20during%20credibility%20judgements.pdf Singer, N. (2010, Nov. 13). Making ads that whisper to thebrain. The New York Times. Retrieved fromhttp://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/14/business/14stream.html Neuromarketing Proof? UCLA Brain Scans Predict Ad Success. SCNLab: Papers – UCLA. Retrieved from http://www.scn.ucla.edu/pdf/Neuromarketing_April_2012.pdf

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