Neuromarketing

Neuromarketing can be defined as the obtaining of information useful for marketers by subjecting individuals to functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and other similar methods of studying automatic responses in the brain to certain stimuli, generally involving products and brands that are part of consumer culture. The term seems to have been first used by Ale Smidts, a marketing research scholar at Erasmus University in the Netherlands, around 2002. There are questions about the origins of the method, but some researchers suggest it began when Gerry Zaltman, a marketing professor at Harvard University, started scanning people's brains to gain insights into consumer preferences.

Some scholars consider neuromarketing to be a branch of neuroeconomics, and others describe it as a part of decision neuroscience. There are neu-roeconomics centers at such universities as George Mason University, MIT, Duke University, and the California Institute of Technology, and a Society for Neuroeconomics that was incorporated in 2005.

Neuromarketing is a means of studying consumer preferences and buying patterns by examining automatic neurological responses—that is, [Page 1041]which parts of people's brains are activated due to increased oxygenated blood flow—when they are shown images of products or other material related to consumer culture. This method avoids problems caused by asking people to verbalize their feelings about products and brands, since their responses to these questions are not always reliable. On the other hand, there is the question of how much the fMRI machines, which are noisy and which stress people being tested to some degree, may have an impact on the brain's functioning. There is also the matter of how marketers translate the physical responses of our brains, as discovered by fMRI, into campaigns and advertising that will be effective. The theory is that when researchers understand more about how the brain functions and can see what responses the brain has to certain stimuli, they can use knowledge of the emotional responses people make to images of products and brands to figure out better ways of shaping consumer decision making.

An important experiment in the development of neuromarketing occurred in 2003 when Professor Read Montague, director of the Human Neuroim-aging Lab and the Center for Theoretical Neuroscience at Baylor College of Medicine, used fMRI to find out why Pepsi won blind taste tests although people generally said they preferred the taste of Coca-Cola. Montague discovered that the medial prefrontal cortex of people being scanned was activated (lit up brightly on the fMRI) when they were told they were drinking Coca-Cola, due in some measure, it is assumed, to the effectiveness of Coca-Cola's marketing and advertising.

Neuromarketing techniques are now being employed in many countries. In Oxford, England, a company named Neurosense has used neuro-marketing to determine how viewers respond to commercials at different times of the day. There are numerous researchers in the field such as BrightHouse Neurostrategies Group in Atlanta; a neuromarketing consulting company in Vienna, Neuroconsult; a company in Los Angeles, FKF, that uses neuromarketing to study political decision making; researchers at the Social Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology; a neuroeconomics lab at Stanford; the Center for Neuroeconomics in the Netherlands; SalesBrain in San Francisco; and companies in many other countries using fMRI for a variety of purposes.

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