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Neuromarketing could make
mind reading the ad-man's ultimate tool
Nick Carr
London
Guardian
Thursday, April 3, 2008
Neuroscience and marketing had a love child a few
years back. Its name - big surprise - is neuromarketing, and the
ugly little fellow is growing up. Corporate pitchmen have always
wanted to get inside our skulls. The more accurately they can
predict how we'll react to stimuli in the marketplace, from prices
to packages to adverts, the more money they can pull from our
pockets and transfer to their employers' coffers.
But picking the brains of consumers hasn't been easy. Marketers
have had to rely on indirect methods to read our thoughts and
feelings. They've watched what we do in stores or tracked how
purchases rise or fall in response to promotional campaigns or
changes in pricing. And they've carried out endless surveys and
focus groups, asking us what we buy and why.
The results have been mixed at best. People, for one thing, don't
always know what they're thinking, and even when they do, they're
not always honest in reporting it. Traditional market research
is fraught with bias and imprecision, which forces companies to
fall back on hunches and rules of thumb.
(Article continues below)
But thanks to recent breakthroughs in brain science, companies
can now actually see what goes on inside our minds when we shop.
Teams of academic and corporate neuromarketers have begun to hook
people up to functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machines
to map how their neurons respond to products and pitches.
Last year, the journal Neuron published an article titled Neural
Predictors of Purchases by a group of scholars from three leading
US universities. The researchers described how they had used brain
imaging to monitor the mental activity of shoppers as they evaluated
products and prices on computer screens.
By watching how different neural circuits light up or go dark
during the buying process, the researchers found they could predict
whether a person would end up purchasing a product or passing
it up. They concluded, after further analysis of the results,
that "the ability of brain activation to predict purchasing
would generalise to other purchasing scenarios".
Full
article here.
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INFOWARS:
BECAUSE THERE'S A WAR ON FOR YOUR MIND
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