Neuromarketing 101

A very interesting and scary article from the January 29th issue of Time magazine - "Marketing to Your Mind". Ever hear of the term "neuromarketing"? I hadn't before I read the piece, but apparently US corporations invested $8 billion in market research for the burgeoning science last year alone.

Neuromarketing is defined as the use of brain-scanning techniques such as functional magnetic resonance imaging to "probe, analyze and influence consumers' purchasing decisions. I'm not really sure how big of a deal $8 billion in R&D really is in the world of marketing, but it's kind of interesting to think that PR executives may soon be utilizing cutting-edge discoveries from the world of neuroscience in order to determine how best to manipulate their target audience's emotions (i.e. fear and greed) to improve product sales.

Its not a long piece and worth the five minutes it takes to read it, in my opinion. But if you are not so inclined, the takeaway is:

"[B]rain scientists are asking volunteers to ponder purchasing choices while lying inside high-tech brain scanners. The resulting real-time images indicate where and how the brain analyzes options, weighs risks and rewards, factors in experiences and emotions and ultimately sets a preference. "We can use brain imaging to gain insight into the mechanisms behind people's decisions in a way that is often difficult to get at simply by asking a person or watching their behavior," says Dr. Gregory Berns, a psychiatrist at Emory University.

To scientists, it's all part of the larger question of how the human brain makes decisions. But the answers may be invaluable to Big Business, which plowed an estimated $8 billion in 2006 into market research in an effort to predict--and sway--how we would spend our money. In the past, marketers relied on relatively crude measures of what got us buying: focus-group questionnaires and measurements of eye movements and perspiration patterns (the more excited you get about something, the more you tend to sweat). Now researchers can go straight to the decider in chief--the brain itself, opening the door to a controversial new field dubbed neuromarketing.

For now, most of the research is purely academic, although even brain experts anticipate that it's just a matter of time before their findings become a routine part of any smart corporation's marketing plans."