Tuesday, 29 June 2021
Thursday, 7 June 2012
Brain-Powered Marketing www.prophet.com Prophet senior partner James Walker has spent his entire career in marketing consulting, analytics and research. He was fascinated to see neuromarketing becoming more mainstream, so he met up with Hilke Plassmann, the global thought leader in the application of neuroscience to marketing. Hilke is an Assistant Professor of Marketing at INSEAD where she teaches marketing management in France and Singapore in INSEAD’s MBA program, and neuromarketing in INSEAD’s Executive Education Program. She is currently Visiting Faculty at The Wharton School as part of the INSEAD–Wharton alliance. James Walker: Hey Hilke, thanks for coming to dinner. It's going to be great to talk about neuromarketing. So, one of your most famous experiments from your time at Caltech stems from the fact that if you tell people a wine is expensive, then they find it more pleasurable to drink; they actually find the experience more stimulating. Rather than the obvious question that this might be useful to marketing luxury cars, jewelry and so on, I'm actually more interested in this as a sales activation idea. If I tell you this promotion’s a bargain, then you're going to believe it and your brain is going to chemically react pleasantly to the idea of a bargain. I wonder if "sales,” with the opportunity for point of purchase stimulus and the vivid environment of the retailer, might mean neurosales rather than neuromarketing might be a faster practical application of neuroscience? It's easier to tune a brain chemistry change with the "in your face" experience of a retail environment versus the subtlety of advertising? Hilke Plassmann: The fact that we clearly showed that “expectations” have a dramatic impact on how you experience a product illustrates the potential power of communicating “something” – be it a quality expectation or the expectation that this is indeed a bargain. An immediate impulse at the point of purchase is a strong emotion, and the point-of-purchase communication tends to be of something relatively simple (eg: Buy 2, get 1 free) as opposed to something more complicated and strategic in branded communications. I do think that neuromarketing experiments can help in that sales context, and we can also bring in related tools, such as eye-tracking for example, to make POP most effective. Even cleverly designed field experiments can bring a lot to the table in such a setting. The use of biological metrics needs to be carefully thought through – how much can a biological marker really add to the question that a marketer is interested? Some neuromarketing techniques are quite costly with respect to financial and time resources, eg: fMRI using a brain scanner. That is why marketers should think twice before they invest in doing marketing research using these techniques. I personally think that more “big picture” questions such as strategic positioning might be the more interesting context to apply fMRI. James: I suppose I've jumped in a bit quickly with my first question. Let's take a step back. Can you define neuromarketing for us? Hilke: There are a lot of different approaches out there. The umbrella is I guess called “decision neuroscience,” and it’s an interdisciplinary enterprise that helps figure out how humans make decisions. Be it, why they vote a certain way, the foods they choose to eat, choice of spouse, or for a few of us, why consumers make the brand and product choices they do. It includes a range of approaches – everything from eye tracking to looking at brain activity. More theory-driven approaches in this area gave rise to the academic discipline of “consumer neuroscience.” Within this area, practitioners’ attempts in the form of “neuromarketing” can be seen as a form of companyspecific market research that is concerned with taking neuroscience theories and approaches and applying them to brands and product choices. Most famously, neuromarketing companies use electrodes or brain scanners to track responses to TV ads or to look at reactions whilst respondents watch a movie. Neuromarketing can also make use of biometrics to track sweating and heart-rate to suggest how the brain is responding to marketing stimulus. James: So, honestly: Are you a skeptic, a believer, or a wait-and-seer? Hilke: It depends. I am a skeptic of how the techniques are being used now, but very optimistic of where we are heading and what these techniques should be capable of in the future. I think that there are a couple of parts to answering the question. I might be optimistic about the techniques developing successfully, but then there is the supplementary question of really applying the results to 2 business issues. And on this point of harnessing neuromarketing for business decision making, I am perhaps sitting on the fence. So, I am all three! James: Talk me through the spectrum of, say, eye tracking through to actual brain imaging, and some of the flavors along the way and score your skepticism... Hilke: What you see from most companies purporting to be in the neuromarketing space is the application of EEG techniques(which track rapid changes in the brain’s electrical field), because EEG is very good at capturing fast changing responses, eg: split second changes in brain activity watching a movie or a TV commercial. fMRI captures slower changes, and can help look at “where” in the brain a response is happening, and that might be appropriate for looking at different visual identities or brand logos. I would recommend using EEG with other techniques, such as eye tracking, skin conductance and facial expression tracking. I think that makes it more powerful that simply looking at brain activity on its own and figuring out what is good or bad, in particular because of EEG’s limitations to capture moment-to-moment changes in emotional engagement. That helps me be a little less skeptical. There have been studies where the same stimulus (such as a TV ad) has been given to different research agencies, and they have come up with different conclusions as to what is positive/negative about the advertisement. Linking EEG-type techniques with other approaches helps to reassure me about the conclusions of the research. You have to keep in mind that there are a lot of researchers’ degrees of freedom not only for how to set up the studies, but also for how to interpret them and translate them back into business insights. James: I know the clichéd question you must be sick of is that your experiments are a bit artificial. Like someone sat in a lab with a colander on his or her head, all wired up! Hilke: A fair point. The cool thing about doing experiments is that you can isolate what it is that you’re looking for, learn from that, and create incremental experiments. In an ideal world, you’d do something in the lab, take some learnings from that experiment and go on to test these in more real-world settings. Some techniques may be a bit cumbersome for the field, but yield interesting results. If they are telling something fundamental, you can test that a little more lightly in field experiments. James: Can you summarize the lingo for us, and give a one- or two-word thumbs up/down on these techniques: fMRI, EEG, MEG? Hilke: Wow! Ok, to put it simply: fMRI uses a MRI scanner to scan the brain, just like maybe after a head trauma. We check for levels of brain activity in response to a stimulus, and see where in the brain a response happens. EEG is a different technique that monitors changes the brain’s electro-magnetic activity using electrodes attached to a consumers head. Most neuromarketing companies take this approach to measure moment-to-moment changes in brain activity (or contrasts left to right) when consumers see a commercial, see the products at the point-of-sale etc. MEG is pretty similar to EEG. It is probably worth making the point that these are the more extreme manifestations of neuromarketing. In a sense, focus groups, depth interviews or retail safaris are all research techniques seeking to better understand the human decision process. Techniques like eye tracking or biometrics are just another notch incrementally more ‘”scientific” in what “signal” they measure than a focus group, and the EEG a notch further still. But they all exist of a continuum of sophistication of technique to try to answer the same questions, or more precisely different aspects of the same question. I really would like to emphasize that I don’t see biological markers as a silver bullet that will replace existing market research techniques. It is much more adding another, new and very valuable dimension. But the key is really in combining different approaches. James: What's genuinely surprised you in what you've learned? What's been a breakthrough learning that could be harnessed by a marketer that might have been missed by other research techniques? I've sat through many retail conferences where shopping-safari video footage shows guys checking out girls' bottoms, and I worked on eye tracking studies of press adverts and, well...er, there were similarly base conclusions! Do you fear the more we 3 connect marketing with raw human emotion (literally the brain's chemical response) that in some ways the resulting communications strategy will actually be dumbed down? For instance, fast car, pretty girl, sunny beach? It's the end of advertising as art, and now it's all a bit Jack Vettriano, or paint by numbers, to press the right neural receptors. Hilke: So I think the wine study is something fundamental and amazing. It shows the power of expectations setting, or what we call marketing (which is really just expectations setting). In a MRI scanner, and I’ve really done this, you see the brain respond in a different way to an expensive wine, and that is pretty incredible. But, I think it’s oversimplified to think that these techniques can create a kit for painting by numbers, where there are buttons to press to create an identikit, optimized, ad. There will always be creativity in advertising. Appealing to the base urges of the brain might in theory create successful marketing communication, but if it’s crass that’ll be more of a negative than a turn on. James: Ok. What can a marketer do tomorrow morning to dip a toe in the water of neuromarketing? What can they do to get started? Hilke: Two things - 1) Method-wise: Eye tracking. What is it they are looking at, for how long? What gets visual attention? I’m a bit skeptical about how EEG is used right now. I would also think that neuromarketing can help better structure conventional market research. 2) Reading about how the brain works to inform how you can create superior value for your customers, how you design products of value to them, how you can communicate this value etc. James: What kinds of marketing and sales questions do you think eventually neuroscience will be best able to answer? Hilke: For sure, in the future this will help us predict behavior without having to ask people the direct question. I think we will be able to predict the attractiveness of innovations and new product features, for example. James: And what are the "watch-outs?" How do you spot the charlatans? Is there a checklist you'd suggest in terms of who to work with, dos/don'ts for picking a neuromarketing vendor? Hilke: I think they need to have some academic support. An academic expert onboard as part of the team, papers published in peer-reviewed journals (white papers on the company’s home page are a nice-to-know, but don’t count in this context!) and independently moderated. James: I suppose it's a bit like the best CRM analytics: consumers shouldn't be wary that marketing communications has be tuned up by looking at brain reactions - all this is trying to do is best meet their needs. It's a bit like dating: If only we could fine-tune the input required to trigger the brain chemistry change we're looking for. Do men and women respond very differently to marketing stimulus? Hilke: Yes, only in that they respond to different contexts, eg: a woman might be more interested in clothes and makeup than a man, and so because they have different interests they respond to differently stimuli. It’s not to say that men and women respond differently per se. The brain does behave in a different way depending on context. Preferences are constructed within context, and that’s an important point to make. James: Any ethical issues? Is it like using a lie detector, but to perfect the design of web pages, size of logo etc? Hilke: No, I don’t think so. Is there an ethical issue in market research, asking people about their “secrets?” James: So you just talked about context. Do you think your learnings will be universal across countries or social class? Would the wine experiment work in the Favelas of Sao Paulo or on the football terraces of Hamburg? What about context or mode or mood? Surely the brain behaves differently depending on what it wants? If you’re told a wine is expensive but what you really want is a beer, would the experiment work? We’re drinking a Tenuta San Guido, which tastes great to me here at dinner in Manhattan, but surely on a boat on sunny day you’d really want a cold beer, and no matter how fancy the wine it’s just not quite what you want? 4 Hilke: Yes, there are some cultural differences. For example, it is better to promote healthy eating by saying healthy eating is better or that unhealthy is worse. In the US for example, we tend to frame this more in terms of a positive, “Hey, it’s better to eat this or that.” In Asia, it’s more, “Don’t do this.” I think my key point is about expectations being fulfilled – and that is universal, even if the exact mechanism for how it happens is influenced by culture and context. James: So, the application to communications is obvious and I think also to sales. What about the use of neuromarketing for the development of concepts, or a more subtle set of expressions of a brand identity? Could neuromarketing help test a range of value propositions and positionings for a Telco wanting to re-launch? Hilke: Yes, for sure. I think many people would say neuromarketing is better suited to help test, for example, a range of value propositions and positioning for a Telco wanting to re-launch as opposed to communications content. Better maybe for a logo or company positioning, or a response to a retail concept. James: Final question. Has your research changed how you respond to marketing? If you're aware and conscious, of this fragrance ad with a hot guy actually changing your brain chemistry, do you think you're trained now to be a bit immune to advertising? Hilke: Yes. I am aware of the importance of expectations, and how expectations will influence behaviors. If I have an important meeting, I will dress formally, as it impacts how I feel and also sets expectations as to how other people will interact with me. I am not immune to advertising, but I am conscious of expectations being set. And the end of the day, a lot of people in my community research what they are NOT good at. So, if you hire an academic consultant for a project, your first question should be what his/her dissertation was about! James: Thanks Hilke. This has been so much fun, and I've learnt a lot. Is there a question you wish I'd ask you? Hilke: Yes, if I may, what are Prophet’s expectations of neuromarketing? James: We want to be involved. We’re looking at developing customer experiences that include tactile and scent signature elements for example, and I think neuromarketing research can help us with these things. I personally am in the skeptic camp for the moment, but I’m keen to be involved in these kinds of research and analytics to help our clients. My final thought returns to your famous wine experiment. I wonder if we’ll enjoy the dessert wine now more or less after a bottle of mid-price Sassicaia?! James Walker (jmwalker@prophet.com) is a Senior Partner at Prophet, a strategic brand and marketing consultancy.
Brain-Powered Marketing
www.prophet.com
Prophet senior partner James Walker has spent his entire
career in marketing consulting, analytics and research. He
was fascinated to see neuromarketing becoming more
mainstream, so he met up with Hilke Plassmann, the global
thought leader in the application of neuroscience to
marketing. Hilke is an Assistant Professor of Marketing at
INSEAD where she teaches marketing management in
France and Singapore in INSEAD’s MBA program, and
neuromarketing in INSEAD’s Executive Education
Program. She is currently Visiting Faculty at The Wharton
School as part of the INSEAD–Wharton alliance.
James Walker: Hey Hilke, thanks for coming to dinner. It's
going to be great to talk about neuromarketing. So, one of
your most famous experiments from your time at Caltech
stems from the fact that if you tell people a wine is
expensive, then they find it more pleasurable to drink; they
actually find the experience more stimulating. Rather than
the obvious question that this might be useful to marketing
luxury cars, jewelry and so on, I'm actually more interested
in this as a sales activation idea. If I tell you this
promotion’s a bargain, then you're going to believe it and
your brain is going to chemically react pleasantly to the
idea of a bargain. I wonder if "sales,” with the opportunity
for point of purchase stimulus and the vivid environment of
the retailer, might mean neurosales rather than
neuromarketing might be a faster practical application of
neuroscience? It's easier to tune a brain chemistry change
with the "in your face" experience of a retail environment
versus the subtlety of advertising?
Hilke Plassmann: The fact that we clearly showed that
“expectations” have a dramatic impact on how you
experience a product illustrates the potential power of
communicating “something” – be it a quality expectation or
the expectation that this is indeed a bargain. An immediate
impulse at the point of purchase is a strong emotion, and
the point-of-purchase communication tends to be of
something relatively simple (eg: Buy 2, get 1 free) as
opposed to something more complicated and strategic in
branded communications. I do think that neuromarketing
experiments can help in that sales context, and we can
also bring in related tools, such as eye-tracking for
example, to make POP most effective. Even cleverly
designed field experiments can bring a lot to the table in
such a setting. The use of biological metrics needs to be
carefully thought through – how much can a biological
marker really add to the question that a marketer is
interested? Some neuromarketing techniques are quite
costly with respect to financial and time resources, eg:
fMRI using a brain scanner. That is why marketers should
think twice before they invest in doing marketing research
using these techniques. I personally think that more “big
picture” questions such as strategic positioning might be
the more interesting context to apply fMRI.
James: I suppose I've jumped in a bit quickly with my first
question. Let's take a step back. Can you define
neuromarketing for us?
Hilke: There are a lot of different approaches out there.
The umbrella is I guess called “decision neuroscience,” and
it’s an interdisciplinary enterprise that helps figure out how
humans make decisions. Be it, why they vote a certain
way, the foods they choose to eat, choice of spouse, or for
a few of us, why consumers make the brand and product
choices they do. It includes a range of approaches –
everything from eye tracking to looking at brain activity.
More theory-driven approaches in this area gave rise to the
academic discipline of “consumer neuroscience.” Within
this area, practitioners’ attempts in the form of
“neuromarketing” can be seen as a form of companyspecific
market research that is concerned with taking
neuroscience theories and approaches and applying them
to brands and product choices. Most famously,
neuromarketing companies use electrodes or brain
scanners to track responses to TV ads or to look at
reactions whilst respondents watch a movie.
Neuromarketing can also make use of biometrics to track
sweating and heart-rate to suggest how the brain is
responding to marketing stimulus.
James: So, honestly: Are you a skeptic, a believer, or a
wait-and-seer?
Hilke: It depends. I am a skeptic of how the techniques are
being used now, but very optimistic of where we are
heading and what these techniques should be capable of
in the future. I think that there are a couple of parts to
answering the question. I might be optimistic about the
techniques developing successfully, but then there is the
supplementary question of really applying the results to
2
business issues. And on this point of harnessing
neuromarketing for business decision making, I am
perhaps sitting on the fence. So, I am all three!
James: Talk me through the spectrum of, say, eye tracking
through to actual brain imaging, and some of the flavors
along the way and score your skepticism...
Hilke: What you see from most companies purporting to
be in the neuromarketing space is the application of EEG
techniques(which track rapid changes in the brain’s
electrical field), because EEG is very good at capturing fast
changing responses, eg: split second changes in brain
activity watching a movie or a TV commercial. fMRI
captures slower changes, and can help look at “where” in
the brain a response is happening, and that might be
appropriate for looking at different visual identities or brand
logos. I would recommend using EEG with other
techniques, such as eye tracking, skin conductance and
facial expression tracking. I think that makes it more
powerful that simply looking at brain activity on its own and
figuring out what is good or bad, in particular because of
EEG’s limitations to capture moment-to-moment changes
in emotional engagement. That helps me be a little less
skeptical. There have been studies where the same
stimulus (such as a TV ad) has been given to different
research agencies, and they have come up with different
conclusions as to what is positive/negative about the
advertisement. Linking EEG-type techniques with other
approaches helps to reassure me about the conclusions of
the research. You have to keep in mind that there are a lot
of researchers’ degrees of freedom not only for how to set
up the studies, but also for how to interpret them and
translate them back into business insights.
James: I know the clichéd question you must be sick of is
that your experiments are a bit artificial. Like someone sat
in a lab with a colander on his or her head, all wired up!
Hilke: A fair point. The cool thing about doing experiments
is that you can isolate what it is that you’re looking for,
learn from that, and create incremental experiments. In an
ideal world, you’d do something in the lab, take some
learnings from that experiment and go on to test these in
more real-world settings. Some techniques may be a bit
cumbersome for the field, but yield interesting results. If
they are telling something fundamental, you can test that a
little more lightly in field experiments.
James: Can you summarize the lingo for us, and give a
one- or two-word thumbs up/down on these techniques:
fMRI, EEG, MEG?
Hilke: Wow! Ok, to put it simply:
fMRI uses a MRI scanner to scan the brain, just
like maybe after a head trauma. We check for
levels of brain activity in response to a stimulus,
and see where in the brain a response happens.
EEG is a different technique that monitors
changes the brain’s electro-magnetic activity
using electrodes attached to a consumers head.
Most neuromarketing companies take this
approach to measure moment-to-moment
changes in brain activity (or contrasts left to right)
when consumers see a commercial, see the
products at the point-of-sale etc.
MEG is pretty similar to EEG. It is probably worth
making the point that these are the more extreme
manifestations of neuromarketing. In a sense,
focus groups, depth interviews or retail safaris are
all research techniques seeking to better
understand the human decision process.
Techniques like eye tracking or biometrics are just another
notch incrementally more ‘”scientific” in what “signal” they
measure than a focus group, and the EEG a notch further
still. But they all exist of a continuum of sophistication of
technique to try to answer the same questions, or more
precisely different aspects of the same question. I really
would like to emphasize that I don’t see biological markers
as a silver bullet that will replace existing market research
techniques. It is much more adding another, new and very
valuable dimension. But the key is really in combining
different approaches.
James: What's genuinely surprised you in what you've
learned? What's been a breakthrough learning that could
be harnessed by a marketer that might have been missed
by other research techniques? I've sat through many retail
conferences where shopping-safari video footage shows
guys checking out girls' bottoms, and I worked on eye
tracking studies of press adverts and, well...er, there were
similarly base conclusions! Do you fear the more we
3
connect marketing with raw human emotion (literally the
brain's chemical response) that in some ways the resulting
communications strategy will actually be dumbed down?
For instance, fast car, pretty girl, sunny beach? It's the end
of advertising as art, and now it's all a bit Jack Vettriano, or
paint by numbers, to press the right neural receptors.
Hilke: So I think the wine study is something fundamental
and amazing. It shows the power of expectations setting,
or what we call marketing (which is really just expectations
setting). In a MRI scanner, and I’ve really done this, you
see the brain respond in a different way to an expensive
wine, and that is pretty incredible. But, I think it’s
oversimplified to think that these techniques can create a
kit for painting by numbers, where there are buttons to
press to create an identikit, optimized, ad. There will
always be creativity in advertising. Appealing to the base
urges of the brain might in theory create successful
marketing communication, but if it’s crass that’ll be more
of a negative than a turn on.
James: Ok. What can a marketer do tomorrow morning to
dip a toe in the water of neuromarketing? What can they
do to get started?
Hilke: Two things -
1) Method-wise: Eye tracking. What is it they are
looking at, for how long? What gets visual
attention? I’m a bit skeptical about how EEG is
used right now. I would also think that
neuromarketing can help better structure
conventional market research.
2) Reading about how the brain works to inform
how you can create superior value for your
customers, how you design products of value to
them, how you can communicate this value etc.
James: What kinds of marketing and sales questions do
you think eventually neuroscience will be best able to
answer?
Hilke: For sure, in the future this will help us predict
behavior without having to ask people the direct question. I
think we will be able to predict the attractiveness of
innovations and new product features, for example.
James: And what are the "watch-outs?" How do you spot
the charlatans? Is there a checklist you'd suggest in terms
of who to work with, dos/don'ts for picking a
neuromarketing vendor?
Hilke: I think they need to have some academic support.
An academic expert onboard as part of the team, papers
published in peer-reviewed journals (white papers on the
company’s home page are a nice-to-know, but don’t
count in this context!) and independently moderated.
James: I suppose it's a bit like the best CRM analytics:
consumers shouldn't be wary that marketing
communications has be tuned up by looking at brain
reactions - all this is trying to do is best meet their needs.
It's a bit like dating: If only we could fine-tune the input
required to trigger the brain chemistry change we're
looking for. Do men and women respond very differently to
marketing stimulus?
Hilke: Yes, only in that they respond to different contexts,
eg: a woman might be more interested in clothes and
makeup than a man, and so because they have different
interests they respond to differently stimuli. It’s not to say
that men and women respond differently per se. The brain
does behave in a different way depending on context.
Preferences are constructed within context, and that’s an
important point to make.
James: Any ethical issues? Is it like using a lie detector,
but to perfect the design of web pages, size of logo etc?
Hilke: No, I don’t think so. Is there an ethical issue in
market research, asking people about their “secrets?”
James: So you just talked about context. Do you think
your learnings will be universal across countries or social
class? Would the wine experiment work in the Favelas of
Sao Paulo or on the football terraces of Hamburg? What
about context or mode or mood? Surely the brain behaves
differently depending on what it wants? If you’re told a
wine is expensive but what you really want is a beer, would
the experiment work? We’re drinking a Tenuta San Guido,
which tastes great to me here at dinner in Manhattan, but
surely on a boat on sunny day you’d really want a cold
beer, and no matter how fancy the wine it’s just not quite
what you want?
4
Hilke: Yes, there are some cultural differences. For
example, it is better to promote healthy eating by saying
healthy eating is better or that unhealthy is worse. In the
US for example, we tend to frame this more in terms of a
positive, “Hey, it’s better to eat this or that.” In Asia, it’s
more, “Don’t do this.” I think my key point is about
expectations being fulfilled – and that is universal, even if
the exact mechanism for how it happens is influenced by
culture and context.
James: So, the application to communications is obvious
and I think also to sales. What about the use of
neuromarketing for the development of concepts, or a
more subtle set of expressions of a brand identity? Could
neuromarketing help test a range of value propositions and
positionings for a Telco wanting to re-launch?
Hilke: Yes, for sure. I think many people would say
neuromarketing is better suited to help test, for example, a
range of value propositions and positioning for a Telco
wanting to re-launch as opposed to communications
content. Better maybe for a logo or company positioning,
or a response to a retail concept.
James: Final question. Has your research changed how
you respond to marketing? If you're aware and conscious,
of this fragrance ad with a hot guy actually changing your
brain chemistry, do you think you're trained now to be a bit
immune to advertising?
Hilke: Yes. I am aware of the importance of expectations,
and how expectations will influence behaviors. If I have an
important meeting, I will dress formally, as it impacts how I
feel and also sets expectations as to how other people will
interact with me. I am not immune to advertising, but I am
conscious of expectations being set. And the end of the
day, a lot of people in my community research what they
are NOT good at. So, if you hire an academic consultant
for a project, your first question should be what his/her
dissertation was about!
James: Thanks Hilke. This has been so much fun, and I've
learnt a lot. Is there a question you wish I'd ask you?
Hilke: Yes, if I may, what are Prophet’s expectations of
neuromarketing?
James: We want to be involved. We’re looking at
developing customer experiences that include tactile and
scent signature elements for example, and I think
neuromarketing research can help us with these things. I
personally am in the skeptic camp for the moment, but I’m
keen to be involved in these kinds of research and
analytics to help our clients. My final thought returns to
your famous wine experiment. I wonder if we’ll enjoy the
dessert wine now more or less after a bottle of mid-price
Sassicaia?!
James Walker (jmwalker@prophet.com) is a Senior Partner
at Prophet, a strategic brand and marketing consultancy.
www.prophet.com
Prophet senior partner James Walker has spent his entire
career in marketing consulting, analytics and research. He
was fascinated to see neuromarketing becoming more
mainstream, so he met up with Hilke Plassmann, the global
thought leader in the application of neuroscience to
marketing. Hilke is an Assistant Professor of Marketing at
INSEAD where she teaches marketing management in
France and Singapore in INSEAD’s MBA program, and
neuromarketing in INSEAD’s Executive Education
Program. She is currently Visiting Faculty at The Wharton
School as part of the INSEAD–Wharton alliance.
James Walker: Hey Hilke, thanks for coming to dinner. It's
going to be great to talk about neuromarketing. So, one of
your most famous experiments from your time at Caltech
stems from the fact that if you tell people a wine is
expensive, then they find it more pleasurable to drink; they
actually find the experience more stimulating. Rather than
the obvious question that this might be useful to marketing
luxury cars, jewelry and so on, I'm actually more interested
in this as a sales activation idea. If I tell you this
promotion’s a bargain, then you're going to believe it and
your brain is going to chemically react pleasantly to the
idea of a bargain. I wonder if "sales,” with the opportunity
for point of purchase stimulus and the vivid environment of
the retailer, might mean neurosales rather than
neuromarketing might be a faster practical application of
neuroscience? It's easier to tune a brain chemistry change
with the "in your face" experience of a retail environment
versus the subtlety of advertising?
Hilke Plassmann: The fact that we clearly showed that
“expectations” have a dramatic impact on how you
experience a product illustrates the potential power of
communicating “something” – be it a quality expectation or
the expectation that this is indeed a bargain. An immediate
impulse at the point of purchase is a strong emotion, and
the point-of-purchase communication tends to be of
something relatively simple (eg: Buy 2, get 1 free) as
opposed to something more complicated and strategic in
branded communications. I do think that neuromarketing
experiments can help in that sales context, and we can
also bring in related tools, such as eye-tracking for
example, to make POP most effective. Even cleverly
designed field experiments can bring a lot to the table in
such a setting. The use of biological metrics needs to be
carefully thought through – how much can a biological
marker really add to the question that a marketer is
interested? Some neuromarketing techniques are quite
costly with respect to financial and time resources, eg:
fMRI using a brain scanner. That is why marketers should
think twice before they invest in doing marketing research
using these techniques. I personally think that more “big
picture” questions such as strategic positioning might be
the more interesting context to apply fMRI.
James: I suppose I've jumped in a bit quickly with my first
question. Let's take a step back. Can you define
neuromarketing for us?
Hilke: There are a lot of different approaches out there.
The umbrella is I guess called “decision neuroscience,” and
it’s an interdisciplinary enterprise that helps figure out how
humans make decisions. Be it, why they vote a certain
way, the foods they choose to eat, choice of spouse, or for
a few of us, why consumers make the brand and product
choices they do. It includes a range of approaches –
everything from eye tracking to looking at brain activity.
More theory-driven approaches in this area gave rise to the
academic discipline of “consumer neuroscience.” Within
this area, practitioners’ attempts in the form of
“neuromarketing” can be seen as a form of companyspecific
market research that is concerned with taking
neuroscience theories and approaches and applying them
to brands and product choices. Most famously,
neuromarketing companies use electrodes or brain
scanners to track responses to TV ads or to look at
reactions whilst respondents watch a movie.
Neuromarketing can also make use of biometrics to track
sweating and heart-rate to suggest how the brain is
responding to marketing stimulus.
James: So, honestly: Are you a skeptic, a believer, or a
wait-and-seer?
Hilke: It depends. I am a skeptic of how the techniques are
being used now, but very optimistic of where we are
heading and what these techniques should be capable of
in the future. I think that there are a couple of parts to
answering the question. I might be optimistic about the
techniques developing successfully, but then there is the
supplementary question of really applying the results to
2
business issues. And on this point of harnessing
neuromarketing for business decision making, I am
perhaps sitting on the fence. So, I am all three!
James: Talk me through the spectrum of, say, eye tracking
through to actual brain imaging, and some of the flavors
along the way and score your skepticism...
Hilke: What you see from most companies purporting to
be in the neuromarketing space is the application of EEG
techniques(which track rapid changes in the brain’s
electrical field), because EEG is very good at capturing fast
changing responses, eg: split second changes in brain
activity watching a movie or a TV commercial. fMRI
captures slower changes, and can help look at “where” in
the brain a response is happening, and that might be
appropriate for looking at different visual identities or brand
logos. I would recommend using EEG with other
techniques, such as eye tracking, skin conductance and
facial expression tracking. I think that makes it more
powerful that simply looking at brain activity on its own and
figuring out what is good or bad, in particular because of
EEG’s limitations to capture moment-to-moment changes
in emotional engagement. That helps me be a little less
skeptical. There have been studies where the same
stimulus (such as a TV ad) has been given to different
research agencies, and they have come up with different
conclusions as to what is positive/negative about the
advertisement. Linking EEG-type techniques with other
approaches helps to reassure me about the conclusions of
the research. You have to keep in mind that there are a lot
of researchers’ degrees of freedom not only for how to set
up the studies, but also for how to interpret them and
translate them back into business insights.
James: I know the clichéd question you must be sick of is
that your experiments are a bit artificial. Like someone sat
in a lab with a colander on his or her head, all wired up!
Hilke: A fair point. The cool thing about doing experiments
is that you can isolate what it is that you’re looking for,
learn from that, and create incremental experiments. In an
ideal world, you’d do something in the lab, take some
learnings from that experiment and go on to test these in
more real-world settings. Some techniques may be a bit
cumbersome for the field, but yield interesting results. If
they are telling something fundamental, you can test that a
little more lightly in field experiments.
James: Can you summarize the lingo for us, and give a
one- or two-word thumbs up/down on these techniques:
fMRI, EEG, MEG?
Hilke: Wow! Ok, to put it simply:
fMRI uses a MRI scanner to scan the brain, just
like maybe after a head trauma. We check for
levels of brain activity in response to a stimulus,
and see where in the brain a response happens.
EEG is a different technique that monitors
changes the brain’s electro-magnetic activity
using electrodes attached to a consumers head.
Most neuromarketing companies take this
approach to measure moment-to-moment
changes in brain activity (or contrasts left to right)
when consumers see a commercial, see the
products at the point-of-sale etc.
MEG is pretty similar to EEG. It is probably worth
making the point that these are the more extreme
manifestations of neuromarketing. In a sense,
focus groups, depth interviews or retail safaris are
all research techniques seeking to better
understand the human decision process.
Techniques like eye tracking or biometrics are just another
notch incrementally more ‘”scientific” in what “signal” they
measure than a focus group, and the EEG a notch further
still. But they all exist of a continuum of sophistication of
technique to try to answer the same questions, or more
precisely different aspects of the same question. I really
would like to emphasize that I don’t see biological markers
as a silver bullet that will replace existing market research
techniques. It is much more adding another, new and very
valuable dimension. But the key is really in combining
different approaches.
James: What's genuinely surprised you in what you've
learned? What's been a breakthrough learning that could
be harnessed by a marketer that might have been missed
by other research techniques? I've sat through many retail
conferences where shopping-safari video footage shows
guys checking out girls' bottoms, and I worked on eye
tracking studies of press adverts and, well...er, there were
similarly base conclusions! Do you fear the more we
3
connect marketing with raw human emotion (literally the
brain's chemical response) that in some ways the resulting
communications strategy will actually be dumbed down?
For instance, fast car, pretty girl, sunny beach? It's the end
of advertising as art, and now it's all a bit Jack Vettriano, or
paint by numbers, to press the right neural receptors.
Hilke: So I think the wine study is something fundamental
and amazing. It shows the power of expectations setting,
or what we call marketing (which is really just expectations
setting). In a MRI scanner, and I’ve really done this, you
see the brain respond in a different way to an expensive
wine, and that is pretty incredible. But, I think it’s
oversimplified to think that these techniques can create a
kit for painting by numbers, where there are buttons to
press to create an identikit, optimized, ad. There will
always be creativity in advertising. Appealing to the base
urges of the brain might in theory create successful
marketing communication, but if it’s crass that’ll be more
of a negative than a turn on.
James: Ok. What can a marketer do tomorrow morning to
dip a toe in the water of neuromarketing? What can they
do to get started?
Hilke: Two things -
1) Method-wise: Eye tracking. What is it they are
looking at, for how long? What gets visual
attention? I’m a bit skeptical about how EEG is
used right now. I would also think that
neuromarketing can help better structure
conventional market research.
2) Reading about how the brain works to inform
how you can create superior value for your
customers, how you design products of value to
them, how you can communicate this value etc.
James: What kinds of marketing and sales questions do
you think eventually neuroscience will be best able to
answer?
Hilke: For sure, in the future this will help us predict
behavior without having to ask people the direct question. I
think we will be able to predict the attractiveness of
innovations and new product features, for example.
James: And what are the "watch-outs?" How do you spot
the charlatans? Is there a checklist you'd suggest in terms
of who to work with, dos/don'ts for picking a
neuromarketing vendor?
Hilke: I think they need to have some academic support.
An academic expert onboard as part of the team, papers
published in peer-reviewed journals (white papers on the
company’s home page are a nice-to-know, but don’t
count in this context!) and independently moderated.
James: I suppose it's a bit like the best CRM analytics:
consumers shouldn't be wary that marketing
communications has be tuned up by looking at brain
reactions - all this is trying to do is best meet their needs.
It's a bit like dating: If only we could fine-tune the input
required to trigger the brain chemistry change we're
looking for. Do men and women respond very differently to
marketing stimulus?
Hilke: Yes, only in that they respond to different contexts,
eg: a woman might be more interested in clothes and
makeup than a man, and so because they have different
interests they respond to differently stimuli. It’s not to say
that men and women respond differently per se. The brain
does behave in a different way depending on context.
Preferences are constructed within context, and that’s an
important point to make.
James: Any ethical issues? Is it like using a lie detector,
but to perfect the design of web pages, size of logo etc?
Hilke: No, I don’t think so. Is there an ethical issue in
market research, asking people about their “secrets?”
James: So you just talked about context. Do you think
your learnings will be universal across countries or social
class? Would the wine experiment work in the Favelas of
Sao Paulo or on the football terraces of Hamburg? What
about context or mode or mood? Surely the brain behaves
differently depending on what it wants? If you’re told a
wine is expensive but what you really want is a beer, would
the experiment work? We’re drinking a Tenuta San Guido,
which tastes great to me here at dinner in Manhattan, but
surely on a boat on sunny day you’d really want a cold
beer, and no matter how fancy the wine it’s just not quite
what you want?
4
Hilke: Yes, there are some cultural differences. For
example, it is better to promote healthy eating by saying
healthy eating is better or that unhealthy is worse. In the
US for example, we tend to frame this more in terms of a
positive, “Hey, it’s better to eat this or that.” In Asia, it’s
more, “Don’t do this.” I think my key point is about
expectations being fulfilled – and that is universal, even if
the exact mechanism for how it happens is influenced by
culture and context.
James: So, the application to communications is obvious
and I think also to sales. What about the use of
neuromarketing for the development of concepts, or a
more subtle set of expressions of a brand identity? Could
neuromarketing help test a range of value propositions and
positionings for a Telco wanting to re-launch?
Hilke: Yes, for sure. I think many people would say
neuromarketing is better suited to help test, for example, a
range of value propositions and positioning for a Telco
wanting to re-launch as opposed to communications
content. Better maybe for a logo or company positioning,
or a response to a retail concept.
James: Final question. Has your research changed how
you respond to marketing? If you're aware and conscious,
of this fragrance ad with a hot guy actually changing your
brain chemistry, do you think you're trained now to be a bit
immune to advertising?
Hilke: Yes. I am aware of the importance of expectations,
and how expectations will influence behaviors. If I have an
important meeting, I will dress formally, as it impacts how I
feel and also sets expectations as to how other people will
interact with me. I am not immune to advertising, but I am
conscious of expectations being set. And the end of the
day, a lot of people in my community research what they
are NOT good at. So, if you hire an academic consultant
for a project, your first question should be what his/her
dissertation was about!
James: Thanks Hilke. This has been so much fun, and I've
learnt a lot. Is there a question you wish I'd ask you?
Hilke: Yes, if I may, what are Prophet’s expectations of
neuromarketing?
James: We want to be involved. We’re looking at
developing customer experiences that include tactile and
scent signature elements for example, and I think
neuromarketing research can help us with these things. I
personally am in the skeptic camp for the moment, but I’m
keen to be involved in these kinds of research and
analytics to help our clients. My final thought returns to
your famous wine experiment. I wonder if we’ll enjoy the
dessert wine now more or less after a bottle of mid-price
Sassicaia?!
James Walker (jmwalker@prophet.com) is a Senior Partner
at Prophet, a strategic brand and marketing consultancy.
Brain-Powered Marketing
Brain-Powered Marketing
www.prophet.com
Prophet senior partner James Walker has spent his entire
career in marketing consulting, analytics and research. He
was fascinated to see neuromarketing becoming more
mainstream, so he met up with Hilke Plassmann, the global
thought leader in the application of neuroscience to
marketing. Hilke is an Assistant Professor of Marketing at
INSEAD where she teaches marketing management in
France and Singapore in INSEAD’s MBA program, and
neuromarketing in INSEAD’s Executive Education
Program. She is currently Visiting Faculty at The Wharton
School as part of the INSEAD–Wharton alliance.
James Walker: Hey Hilke, thanks for coming to dinner. It's
going to be great to talk about neuromarketing. So, one of
your most famous experiments from your time at Caltech
stems from the fact that if you tell people a wine is
expensive, then they find it more pleasurable to drink; they
actually find the experience more stimulating. Rather than
the obvious question that this might be useful to marketing
luxury cars, jewelry and so on, I'm actually more interested
in this as a sales activation idea. If I tell you this
promotion’s a bargain, then you're going to believe it and
your brain is going to chemically react pleasantly to the
idea of a bargain. I wonder if "sales,” with the opportunity
for point of purchase stimulus and the vivid environment of
the retailer, might mean neurosales rather than
neuromarketing might be a faster practical application of
neuroscience? It's easier to tune a brain chemistry change
with the "in your face" experience of a retail environment
versus the subtlety of advertising?
Hilke Plassmann: The fact that we clearly showed that
“expectations” have a dramatic impact on how you
experience a product illustrates the potential power of
communicating “something” – be it a quality expectation or
the expectation that this is indeed a bargain. An immediate
impulse at the point of purchase is a strong emotion, and
the point-of-purchase communication tends to be of
something relatively simple (eg: Buy 2, get 1 free) as
opposed to something more complicated and strategic in
branded communications. I do think that neuromarketing
experiments can help in that sales context, and we can
also bring in related tools, such as eye-tracking for
example, to make POP most effective. Even cleverly
designed field experiments can bring a lot to the table in
such a setting. The use of biological metrics needs to be
carefully thought through – how much can a biological
marker really add to the question that a marketer is
interested? Some neuromarketing techniques are quite
costly with respect to financial and time resources, eg:
fMRI using a brain scanner. That is why marketers should
think twice before they invest in doing marketing research
using these techniques. I personally think that more “big
picture” questions such as strategic positioning might be
the more interesting context to apply fMRI.
James: I suppose I've jumped in a bit quickly with my first
question. Let's take a step back. Can you define
neuromarketing for us?
Hilke: There are a lot of different approaches out there.
The umbrella is I guess called “decision neuroscience,” and
it’s an interdisciplinary enterprise that helps figure out how
humans make decisions. Be it, why they vote a certain
way, the foods they choose to eat, choice of spouse, or for
a few of us, why consumers make the brand and product
choices they do. It includes a range of approaches –
everything from eye tracking to looking at brain activity.
More theory-driven approaches in this area gave rise to the
academic discipline of “consumer neuroscience.” Within
this area, practitioners’ attempts in the form of
“neuromarketing” can be seen as a form of companyspecific
market research that is concerned with taking
neuroscience theories and approaches and applying them
to brands and product choices. Most famously,
neuromarketing companies use electrodes or brain
scanners to track responses to TV ads or to look at
reactions whilst respondents watch a movie.
Neuromarketing can also make use of biometrics to track
sweating and heart-rate to suggest how the brain is
responding to marketing stimulus.
James: So, honestly: Are you a skeptic, a believer, or a
wait-and-seer?
Hilke: It depends. I am a skeptic of how the techniques are
being used now, but very optimistic of where we are
heading and what these techniques should be capable of
in the future. I think that there are a couple of parts to
answering the question. I might be optimistic about the
techniques developing successfully, but then there is the
supplementary question of really applying the results to
2
business issues. And on this point of harnessing
neuromarketing for business decision making, I am
perhaps sitting on the fence. So, I am all three!
James: Talk me through the spectrum of, say, eye tracking
through to actual brain imaging, and some of the flavors
along the way and score your skepticism...
Hilke: What you see from most companies purporting to
be in the neuromarketing space is the application of EEG
techniques(which track rapid changes in the brain’s
electrical field), because EEG is very good at capturing fast
changing responses, eg: split second changes in brain
activity watching a movie or a TV commercial. fMRI
captures slower changes, and can help look at “where” in
the brain a response is happening, and that might be
appropriate for looking at different visual identities or brand
logos. I would recommend using EEG with other
techniques, such as eye tracking, skin conductance and
facial expression tracking. I think that makes it more
powerful that simply looking at brain activity on its own and
figuring out what is good or bad, in particular because of
EEG’s limitations to capture moment-to-moment changes
in emotional engagement. That helps me be a little less
skeptical. There have been studies where the same
stimulus (such as a TV ad) has been given to different
research agencies, and they have come up with different
conclusions as to what is positive/negative about the
advertisement. Linking EEG-type techniques with other
approaches helps to reassure me about the conclusions of
the research. You have to keep in mind that there are a lot
of researchers’ degrees of freedom not only for how to set
up the studies, but also for how to interpret them and
translate them back into business insights.
James: I know the clichéd question you must be sick of is
that your experiments are a bit artificial. Like someone sat
in a lab with a colander on his or her head, all wired up!
Hilke: A fair point. The cool thing about doing experiments
is that you can isolate what it is that you’re looking for,
learn from that, and create incremental experiments. In an
ideal world, you’d do something in the lab, take some
learnings from that experiment and go on to test these in
more real-world settings. Some techniques may be a bit
cumbersome for the field, but yield interesting results. If
they are telling something fundamental, you can test that a
little more lightly in field experiments.
James: Can you summarize the lingo for us, and give a
one- or two-word thumbs up/down on these techniques:
fMRI, EEG, MEG?
Hilke: Wow! Ok, to put it simply:
fMRI uses a MRI scanner to scan the brain, just
like maybe after a head trauma. We check for
levels of brain activity in response to a stimulus,
and see where in the brain a response happens.
EEG is a different technique that monitors
changes the brain’s electro-magnetic activity
using electrodes attached to a consumers head.
Most neuromarketing companies take this
approach to measure moment-to-moment
changes in brain activity (or contrasts left to right)
when consumers see a commercial, see the
products at the point-of-sale etc.
MEG is pretty similar to EEG. It is probably worth
making the point that these are the more extreme
manifestations of neuromarketing. In a sense,
focus groups, depth interviews or retail safaris are
all research techniques seeking to better
understand the human decision process.
Techniques like eye tracking or biometrics are just another
notch incrementally more ‘”scientific” in what “signal” they
measure than a focus group, and the EEG a notch further
still. But they all exist of a continuum of sophistication of
technique to try to answer the same questions, or more
precisely different aspects of the same question. I really
would like to emphasize that I don’t see biological markers
as a silver bullet that will replace existing market research
techniques. It is much more adding another, new and very
valuable dimension. But the key is really in combining
different approaches.
James: What's genuinely surprised you in what you've
learned? What's been a breakthrough learning that could
be harnessed by a marketer that might have been missed
by other research techniques? I've sat through many retail
conferences where shopping-safari video footage shows
guys checking out girls' bottoms, and I worked on eye
tracking studies of press adverts and, well...er, there were
similarly base conclusions! Do you fear the more we
3
connect marketing with raw human emotion (literally the
brain's chemical response) that in some ways the resulting
communications strategy will actually be dumbed down?
For instance, fast car, pretty girl, sunny beach? It's the end
of advertising as art, and now it's all a bit Jack Vettriano, or
paint by numbers, to press the right neural receptors.
Hilke: So I think the wine study is something fundamental
and amazing. It shows the power of expectations setting,
or what we call marketing (which is really just expectations
setting). In a MRI scanner, and I’ve really done this, you
see the brain respond in a different way to an expensive
wine, and that is pretty incredible. But, I think it’s
oversimplified to think that these techniques can create a
kit for painting by numbers, where there are buttons to
press to create an identikit, optimized, ad. There will
always be creativity in advertising. Appealing to the base
urges of the brain might in theory create successful
marketing communication, but if it’s crass that’ll be more
of a negative than a turn on.
James: Ok. What can a marketer do tomorrow morning to
dip a toe in the water of neuromarketing? What can they
do to get started?
Hilke: Two things -
1) Method-wise: Eye tracking. What is it they are
looking at, for how long? What gets visual
attention? I’m a bit skeptical about how EEG is
used right now. I would also think that
neuromarketing can help better structure
conventional market research.
2) Reading about how the brain works to inform
how you can create superior value for your
customers, how you design products of value to
them, how you can communicate this value etc.
James: What kinds of marketing and sales questions do
you think eventually neuroscience will be best able to
answer?
Hilke: For sure, in the future this will help us predict
behavior without having to ask people the direct question. I
think we will be able to predict the attractiveness of
innovations and new product features, for example.
James: And what are the "watch-outs?" How do you spot
the charlatans? Is there a checklist you'd suggest in terms
of who to work with, dos/don'ts for picking a
neuromarketing vendor?
Hilke: I think they need to have some academic support.
An academic expert onboard as part of the team, papers
published in peer-reviewed journals (white papers on the
company’s home page are a nice-to-know, but don’t
count in this context!) and independently moderated.
James: I suppose it's a bit like the best CRM analytics:
consumers shouldn't be wary that marketing
communications has be tuned up by looking at brain
reactions - all this is trying to do is best meet their needs.
It's a bit like dating: If only we could fine-tune the input
required to trigger the brain chemistry change we're
looking for. Do men and women respond very differently to
marketing stimulus?
Hilke: Yes, only in that they respond to different contexts,
eg: a woman might be more interested in clothes and
makeup than a man, and so because they have different
interests they respond to differently stimuli. It’s not to say
that men and women respond differently per se. The brain
does behave in a different way depending on context.
Preferences are constructed within context, and that’s an
important point to make.
James: Any ethical issues? Is it like using a lie detector,
but to perfect the design of web pages, size of logo etc?
Hilke: No, I don’t think so. Is there an ethical issue in
market research, asking people about their “secrets?”
James: So you just talked about context. Do you think
your learnings will be universal across countries or social
class? Would the wine experiment work in the Favelas of
Sao Paulo or on the football terraces of Hamburg? What
about context or mode or mood? Surely the brain behaves
differently depending on what it wants? If you’re told a
wine is expensive but what you really want is a beer, would
the experiment work? We’re drinking a Tenuta San Guido,
which tastes great to me here at dinner in Manhattan, but
surely on a boat on sunny day you’d really want a cold
beer, and no matter how fancy the wine it’s just not quite
what you want?
4
Hilke: Yes, there are some cultural differences. For
example, it is better to promote healthy eating by saying
healthy eating is better or that unhealthy is worse. In the
US for example, we tend to frame this more in terms of a
positive, “Hey, it’s better to eat this or that.” In Asia, it’s
more, “Don’t do this.” I think my key point is about
expectations being fulfilled – and that is universal, even if
the exact mechanism for how it happens is influenced by
culture and context.
James: So, the application to communications is obvious
and I think also to sales. What about the use of
neuromarketing for the development of concepts, or a
more subtle set of expressions of a brand identity? Could
neuromarketing help test a range of value propositions and
positionings for a Telco wanting to re-launch?
Hilke: Yes, for sure. I think many people would say
neuromarketing is better suited to help test, for example, a
range of value propositions and positioning for a Telco
wanting to re-launch as opposed to communications
content. Better maybe for a logo or company positioning,
or a response to a retail concept.
James: Final question. Has your research changed how
you respond to marketing? If you're aware and conscious,
of this fragrance ad with a hot guy actually changing your
brain chemistry, do you think you're trained now to be a bit
immune to advertising?
Hilke: Yes. I am aware of the importance of expectations,
and how expectations will influence behaviors. If I have an
important meeting, I will dress formally, as it impacts how I
feel and also sets expectations as to how other people will
interact with me. I am not immune to advertising, but I am
conscious of expectations being set. And the end of the
day, a lot of people in my community research what they
are NOT good at. So, if you hire an academic consultant
for a project, your first question should be what his/her
dissertation was about!
James: Thanks Hilke. This has been so much fun, and I've
learnt a lot. Is there a question you wish I'd ask you?
Hilke: Yes, if I may, what are Prophet’s expectations of
neuromarketing?
James: We want to be involved. We’re looking at
developing customer experiences that include tactile and
scent signature elements for example, and I think
neuromarketing research can help us with these things. I
personally am in the skeptic camp for the moment, but I’m
keen to be involved in these kinds of research and
analytics to help our clients. My final thought returns to
your famous wine experiment. I wonder if we’ll enjoy the
dessert wine now more or less after a bottle of mid-price
Sassicaia?!
James Walker (jmwalker@prophet.com) is a Senior Partner
at Prophet, a strategic brand and marketing consultancy.
www.prophet.com
Prophet senior partner James Walker has spent his entire
career in marketing consulting, analytics and research. He
was fascinated to see neuromarketing becoming more
mainstream, so he met up with Hilke Plassmann, the global
thought leader in the application of neuroscience to
marketing. Hilke is an Assistant Professor of Marketing at
INSEAD where she teaches marketing management in
France and Singapore in INSEAD’s MBA program, and
neuromarketing in INSEAD’s Executive Education
Program. She is currently Visiting Faculty at The Wharton
School as part of the INSEAD–Wharton alliance.
James Walker: Hey Hilke, thanks for coming to dinner. It's
going to be great to talk about neuromarketing. So, one of
your most famous experiments from your time at Caltech
stems from the fact that if you tell people a wine is
expensive, then they find it more pleasurable to drink; they
actually find the experience more stimulating. Rather than
the obvious question that this might be useful to marketing
luxury cars, jewelry and so on, I'm actually more interested
in this as a sales activation idea. If I tell you this
promotion’s a bargain, then you're going to believe it and
your brain is going to chemically react pleasantly to the
idea of a bargain. I wonder if "sales,” with the opportunity
for point of purchase stimulus and the vivid environment of
the retailer, might mean neurosales rather than
neuromarketing might be a faster practical application of
neuroscience? It's easier to tune a brain chemistry change
with the "in your face" experience of a retail environment
versus the subtlety of advertising?
Hilke Plassmann: The fact that we clearly showed that
“expectations” have a dramatic impact on how you
experience a product illustrates the potential power of
communicating “something” – be it a quality expectation or
the expectation that this is indeed a bargain. An immediate
impulse at the point of purchase is a strong emotion, and
the point-of-purchase communication tends to be of
something relatively simple (eg: Buy 2, get 1 free) as
opposed to something more complicated and strategic in
branded communications. I do think that neuromarketing
experiments can help in that sales context, and we can
also bring in related tools, such as eye-tracking for
example, to make POP most effective. Even cleverly
designed field experiments can bring a lot to the table in
such a setting. The use of biological metrics needs to be
carefully thought through – how much can a biological
marker really add to the question that a marketer is
interested? Some neuromarketing techniques are quite
costly with respect to financial and time resources, eg:
fMRI using a brain scanner. That is why marketers should
think twice before they invest in doing marketing research
using these techniques. I personally think that more “big
picture” questions such as strategic positioning might be
the more interesting context to apply fMRI.
James: I suppose I've jumped in a bit quickly with my first
question. Let's take a step back. Can you define
neuromarketing for us?
Hilke: There are a lot of different approaches out there.
The umbrella is I guess called “decision neuroscience,” and
it’s an interdisciplinary enterprise that helps figure out how
humans make decisions. Be it, why they vote a certain
way, the foods they choose to eat, choice of spouse, or for
a few of us, why consumers make the brand and product
choices they do. It includes a range of approaches –
everything from eye tracking to looking at brain activity.
More theory-driven approaches in this area gave rise to the
academic discipline of “consumer neuroscience.” Within
this area, practitioners’ attempts in the form of
“neuromarketing” can be seen as a form of companyspecific
market research that is concerned with taking
neuroscience theories and approaches and applying them
to brands and product choices. Most famously,
neuromarketing companies use electrodes or brain
scanners to track responses to TV ads or to look at
reactions whilst respondents watch a movie.
Neuromarketing can also make use of biometrics to track
sweating and heart-rate to suggest how the brain is
responding to marketing stimulus.
James: So, honestly: Are you a skeptic, a believer, or a
wait-and-seer?
Hilke: It depends. I am a skeptic of how the techniques are
being used now, but very optimistic of where we are
heading and what these techniques should be capable of
in the future. I think that there are a couple of parts to
answering the question. I might be optimistic about the
techniques developing successfully, but then there is the
supplementary question of really applying the results to
2
business issues. And on this point of harnessing
neuromarketing for business decision making, I am
perhaps sitting on the fence. So, I am all three!
James: Talk me through the spectrum of, say, eye tracking
through to actual brain imaging, and some of the flavors
along the way and score your skepticism...
Hilke: What you see from most companies purporting to
be in the neuromarketing space is the application of EEG
techniques(which track rapid changes in the brain’s
electrical field), because EEG is very good at capturing fast
changing responses, eg: split second changes in brain
activity watching a movie or a TV commercial. fMRI
captures slower changes, and can help look at “where” in
the brain a response is happening, and that might be
appropriate for looking at different visual identities or brand
logos. I would recommend using EEG with other
techniques, such as eye tracking, skin conductance and
facial expression tracking. I think that makes it more
powerful that simply looking at brain activity on its own and
figuring out what is good or bad, in particular because of
EEG’s limitations to capture moment-to-moment changes
in emotional engagement. That helps me be a little less
skeptical. There have been studies where the same
stimulus (such as a TV ad) has been given to different
research agencies, and they have come up with different
conclusions as to what is positive/negative about the
advertisement. Linking EEG-type techniques with other
approaches helps to reassure me about the conclusions of
the research. You have to keep in mind that there are a lot
of researchers’ degrees of freedom not only for how to set
up the studies, but also for how to interpret them and
translate them back into business insights.
James: I know the clichéd question you must be sick of is
that your experiments are a bit artificial. Like someone sat
in a lab with a colander on his or her head, all wired up!
Hilke: A fair point. The cool thing about doing experiments
is that you can isolate what it is that you’re looking for,
learn from that, and create incremental experiments. In an
ideal world, you’d do something in the lab, take some
learnings from that experiment and go on to test these in
more real-world settings. Some techniques may be a bit
cumbersome for the field, but yield interesting results. If
they are telling something fundamental, you can test that a
little more lightly in field experiments.
James: Can you summarize the lingo for us, and give a
one- or two-word thumbs up/down on these techniques:
fMRI, EEG, MEG?
Hilke: Wow! Ok, to put it simply:
fMRI uses a MRI scanner to scan the brain, just
like maybe after a head trauma. We check for
levels of brain activity in response to a stimulus,
and see where in the brain a response happens.
EEG is a different technique that monitors
changes the brain’s electro-magnetic activity
using electrodes attached to a consumers head.
Most neuromarketing companies take this
approach to measure moment-to-moment
changes in brain activity (or contrasts left to right)
when consumers see a commercial, see the
products at the point-of-sale etc.
MEG is pretty similar to EEG. It is probably worth
making the point that these are the more extreme
manifestations of neuromarketing. In a sense,
focus groups, depth interviews or retail safaris are
all research techniques seeking to better
understand the human decision process.
Techniques like eye tracking or biometrics are just another
notch incrementally more ‘”scientific” in what “signal” they
measure than a focus group, and the EEG a notch further
still. But they all exist of a continuum of sophistication of
technique to try to answer the same questions, or more
precisely different aspects of the same question. I really
would like to emphasize that I don’t see biological markers
as a silver bullet that will replace existing market research
techniques. It is much more adding another, new and very
valuable dimension. But the key is really in combining
different approaches.
James: What's genuinely surprised you in what you've
learned? What's been a breakthrough learning that could
be harnessed by a marketer that might have been missed
by other research techniques? I've sat through many retail
conferences where shopping-safari video footage shows
guys checking out girls' bottoms, and I worked on eye
tracking studies of press adverts and, well...er, there were
similarly base conclusions! Do you fear the more we
3
connect marketing with raw human emotion (literally the
brain's chemical response) that in some ways the resulting
communications strategy will actually be dumbed down?
For instance, fast car, pretty girl, sunny beach? It's the end
of advertising as art, and now it's all a bit Jack Vettriano, or
paint by numbers, to press the right neural receptors.
Hilke: So I think the wine study is something fundamental
and amazing. It shows the power of expectations setting,
or what we call marketing (which is really just expectations
setting). In a MRI scanner, and I’ve really done this, you
see the brain respond in a different way to an expensive
wine, and that is pretty incredible. But, I think it’s
oversimplified to think that these techniques can create a
kit for painting by numbers, where there are buttons to
press to create an identikit, optimized, ad. There will
always be creativity in advertising. Appealing to the base
urges of the brain might in theory create successful
marketing communication, but if it’s crass that’ll be more
of a negative than a turn on.
James: Ok. What can a marketer do tomorrow morning to
dip a toe in the water of neuromarketing? What can they
do to get started?
Hilke: Two things -
1) Method-wise: Eye tracking. What is it they are
looking at, for how long? What gets visual
attention? I’m a bit skeptical about how EEG is
used right now. I would also think that
neuromarketing can help better structure
conventional market research.
2) Reading about how the brain works to inform
how you can create superior value for your
customers, how you design products of value to
them, how you can communicate this value etc.
James: What kinds of marketing and sales questions do
you think eventually neuroscience will be best able to
answer?
Hilke: For sure, in the future this will help us predict
behavior without having to ask people the direct question. I
think we will be able to predict the attractiveness of
innovations and new product features, for example.
James: And what are the "watch-outs?" How do you spot
the charlatans? Is there a checklist you'd suggest in terms
of who to work with, dos/don'ts for picking a
neuromarketing vendor?
Hilke: I think they need to have some academic support.
An academic expert onboard as part of the team, papers
published in peer-reviewed journals (white papers on the
company’s home page are a nice-to-know, but don’t
count in this context!) and independently moderated.
James: I suppose it's a bit like the best CRM analytics:
consumers shouldn't be wary that marketing
communications has be tuned up by looking at brain
reactions - all this is trying to do is best meet their needs.
It's a bit like dating: If only we could fine-tune the input
required to trigger the brain chemistry change we're
looking for. Do men and women respond very differently to
marketing stimulus?
Hilke: Yes, only in that they respond to different contexts,
eg: a woman might be more interested in clothes and
makeup than a man, and so because they have different
interests they respond to differently stimuli. It’s not to say
that men and women respond differently per se. The brain
does behave in a different way depending on context.
Preferences are constructed within context, and that’s an
important point to make.
James: Any ethical issues? Is it like using a lie detector,
but to perfect the design of web pages, size of logo etc?
Hilke: No, I don’t think so. Is there an ethical issue in
market research, asking people about their “secrets?”
James: So you just talked about context. Do you think
your learnings will be universal across countries or social
class? Would the wine experiment work in the Favelas of
Sao Paulo or on the football terraces of Hamburg? What
about context or mode or mood? Surely the brain behaves
differently depending on what it wants? If you’re told a
wine is expensive but what you really want is a beer, would
the experiment work? We’re drinking a Tenuta San Guido,
which tastes great to me here at dinner in Manhattan, but
surely on a boat on sunny day you’d really want a cold
beer, and no matter how fancy the wine it’s just not quite
what you want?
4
Hilke: Yes, there are some cultural differences. For
example, it is better to promote healthy eating by saying
healthy eating is better or that unhealthy is worse. In the
US for example, we tend to frame this more in terms of a
positive, “Hey, it’s better to eat this or that.” In Asia, it’s
more, “Don’t do this.” I think my key point is about
expectations being fulfilled – and that is universal, even if
the exact mechanism for how it happens is influenced by
culture and context.
James: So, the application to communications is obvious
and I think also to sales. What about the use of
neuromarketing for the development of concepts, or a
more subtle set of expressions of a brand identity? Could
neuromarketing help test a range of value propositions and
positionings for a Telco wanting to re-launch?
Hilke: Yes, for sure. I think many people would say
neuromarketing is better suited to help test, for example, a
range of value propositions and positioning for a Telco
wanting to re-launch as opposed to communications
content. Better maybe for a logo or company positioning,
or a response to a retail concept.
James: Final question. Has your research changed how
you respond to marketing? If you're aware and conscious,
of this fragrance ad with a hot guy actually changing your
brain chemistry, do you think you're trained now to be a bit
immune to advertising?
Hilke: Yes. I am aware of the importance of expectations,
and how expectations will influence behaviors. If I have an
important meeting, I will dress formally, as it impacts how I
feel and also sets expectations as to how other people will
interact with me. I am not immune to advertising, but I am
conscious of expectations being set. And the end of the
day, a lot of people in my community research what they
are NOT good at. So, if you hire an academic consultant
for a project, your first question should be what his/her
dissertation was about!
James: Thanks Hilke. This has been so much fun, and I've
learnt a lot. Is there a question you wish I'd ask you?
Hilke: Yes, if I may, what are Prophet’s expectations of
neuromarketing?
James: We want to be involved. We’re looking at
developing customer experiences that include tactile and
scent signature elements for example, and I think
neuromarketing research can help us with these things. I
personally am in the skeptic camp for the moment, but I’m
keen to be involved in these kinds of research and
analytics to help our clients. My final thought returns to
your famous wine experiment. I wonder if we’ll enjoy the
dessert wine now more or less after a bottle of mid-price
Sassicaia?!
James Walker (jmwalker@prophet.com) is a Senior Partner
at Prophet, a strategic brand and marketing consultancy.
MANAGEMENT OF CONSUMERS’ ATTENTION – WHAT CAN THE ADVERTISER DO TO SURVIVE THE MEDIA REVOLUTION
MANAGEMENT OF CONSUMERS’ ATTENTION – WHAT CAN THE
ADVERTISER DO TO SURVIVE THE MEDIA REVOLUTION
Assistant, Master’s degree, Kwiatkowska Joanna, Czestochowa University of Technology, Faculty
of Management, Poland, joanna@zim.pcz.pl
ABSTRACT: “I know half the money I spend on advertising is wasted, I just don’t know which half”
joked John Wanamaker, who created the first department store in 1876 [15]. In spite of the passage
of time Wanamaker’s saying is still in force. However, it may change soon thanks to coming into
being of new discipline – neuromarketing, which is combination of advertisements’ artistry and
sciences (inter alia neuropsychology, cognitive psychology, neuroimaging, cognitive science,
psycholinguistics). Neuromarketing postulates using fMRI, EEG, EMG or eye tracking techniques
for the purpose of recognising consumers’ preferences toward specific goods and brands as well as
mechanisms concerning decision-making process related to purchases. The goal of neuromarketing
is to obtain the information - the human brain’s responses, which marketing stimuli (advertisement)
is effective.
Key words: the media, neuromarketing, advertisement
JEL codes:M3, M37, M39
The media and revolution
The media are inseparable element from our reality [Latin: means, agent]. Their influence
on individual and the whole communities is irrefutable. More than two hundred years ago (1774)
Irish philosopher, Edmund Burke, said: “there were three Estates in Parliament, but in the
Reporters Gallery yonder, there sat a Fourth Estate more important far then they all” [1].
There are a lot of coined terms which describe surrounding world: media civilization
(Tomasz Goban-Klas, Polish sociologist, authority on media), mass culture, mediocracy (Philips),
The Electronic Republic (Lawrence K. Grossman, former president of NBC News and former
president of the Public Broadcasting System [2]).
For every modern firm the main commodity is the information, which comes under the
market mechanism and the law of supply and demand. It is said that there is nowadays the
information economy, information industry, knowledge based society and the information society.
The media undergo greater digitalization with regard to incredible development of the latest
technologies. Lawrence K. Grossman said: „Gutenberg made everybody a reader. Xerox made
everybody a publisher. Interactive telecommunications is making everybody a potential lobbyist.”
[3]. Nowadays everyone who has the Internet access is able to establish own radio station,
television station or newspaper. The competition on the media market is growing – the number of
recipients is limited and the mass media are undergoing the greater fragmentation process. How do
advertisers find themselves in such a situation? The result of the scattered media is the cost rise of
reaching the recipients. Because the media are not uniform, advertisements have to be more
attractive and personalized. More and more popular is direct marketing. Maybe someday there will
be the advertising unit elaborated in detail on the basis of databases, directly addressed to the
specific recipient. In all probability the contents of such advertising unit will be very interesting,
compatible with the social status and lifestyle of every special recipient.
Another problem is the effectiveness of the advertisement and the presence of the science in
its realization. The sources of knowledge, which are the foundations of the modern marketing, are
going back to the fifties last century (sic!). Robert Heath (author of “The Hidden Power of
Advertising” and the founder the Value Creation Company) said, that we live nowadays in “the
advertising stone age” [9]. Since then many domains have been developed, such neuropsychology,
cognitive psychology, neuroimaging, cognitive science psycholinguistics. The attainments of these
domains constitute wealth of information regarding consumers’ consciousness and their behaviours
as well as factors that are influencing on decision-making process oriented to purchases. The
marriage of these sciences and marketing bore fruits in the form of the new discipline –
neuromarketing, which is probably the only one chance of advertisement to survive the media
revolution.
Neuro + marketing
The majority of the widely applied marketing researches consist in direct interviewing,
conducting an opinion poll or carrying out a telephone, magazine, etc. survey and audits. Regardless
of utilized techniques and statistical analysis for interpretation of results, these researches are
unfortunately burdened with error that it is impossible to eliminate using such “out of date”
methods. This error is related to consumers’ declaration. Modern psychology proves that people
very often say one thing and then they do something completely else and what is more they think
otherwise. Professor Gerald Zaltman (Harvard Business School) said: "The world has changed, but
our methods for understanding consumers have not. We keep relying on familiar but ineffective
research techniques and consequently misread consumers' actions and thoughts. The products we
create based on those techniques, simply aren't connecting with consumers" [4]. It was professor
Zaltman who decided in 1998 to take advantage of existing neurobiological technologies in order to
check the activity of these brain parts that refer to the decision-making process [5]. The experiment
consisted in “looking into” the consumer’s brain using MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) and
checking “How consumers think” (it is also the title of professor’s Zaltman book).This is how
neuromarketing came into being.
Professor Zaltman is the person who is regarded as the founder of the first neuromarketing
institute (Harvard University, 1998r.). The term neuromarketing has been coined in 2000 by Ale
Smidts (Erasmus University, Rotterdam). Nowadays there are 12 neuromarketing institutes that are
operating all over the world [10] (Europe, USA). The 13th institute was established in 2007 in
Poland (LAB company in Warsaw founded by professor Rafał K. Ohme, Warsaw School of Social
Sciences and Humanities).
Peering inside customers’ heads – 1st method
One of the easiest neuromarketing tests is based on the basic instrument from the
psychologists’ workbench – measurement of the reaction time. By using personal computer it is
possible to measure how fast studied person will answer the asked question– it is not essential
whether the button “yes” or “no” has been pressed. The reaction time is the neurophysiological
phenomenon and human does not have possible influence on it. It reflects the emotional state and
the motivation of the studied person. The reaction time is useful to verify if studied person perceive
a brand positively as well as its susceptibility to competition’s influence.
Peering inside customers’ heads – 2nd method
It has elapsed more than 35 years since Edward Purcell and Felix Bloch independently
discovered Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) (1945) and before Magnetic Resonance Imaging
(MRI) has been put into clinical practice. This method, which enables obtainment of contrast soft
tissues images and does not expose the patient to ionizing radiation, has revolutionised medical
diagnosis.
The improved version of MRI – fMRI (Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) represents
the energetic economy of the brain (blood oxygenation, glucose combustion - the BOLD effect
(Blood Oxygenation Level Dependent)) which reflects mental processes (the neuroimaging results
are represented in the form of the heat map (Figure 1), where the red colour corresponds to high
activity of the given area). The more a structure is active, the more energy it consumes.
Figure 1 The heat map – the result of neuroimaging (fMRI)
Source: http://digitalspotlight.wordpress.com/2008/03/25/would-you-have-a-few-minutes-for-abrain-
map/
As the topography of the brain centres is known (responsible for happiness, fear, decisionmaking
process, sense of eyesight, hearing and touch, etc.), it is possible to ascertain what emotions
(or if any) has evoked specific advertisements and what was its intensity! Professor Rafal Ohme
said, that application of fMRI consists in “thoughts detection which are still the unknown for our
»ego«.” [6].
In 2004 Daimler AG corporation (formerly DaimlerChrysler), which is the owner of brands
such as Mercedes-Benz®, Smart® and Maybach®, took advantage of fMRI to test what are the men’s
reactions to different car models. The results were surprising: attractive cars cause stimulation of
the same brain regions as faces [9][10].
In the 44th volume of Neuron (October 13, 2004) Read Montague, a neuroscientist at the
Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, TX, USA, published the results of his study [11]. The test
(called the “Pepsi Challenge”) was concerning consumers’ preferences and attitudes toward two
very well-known and nearly identical beverages with regard to the chemical composition: Coca-
Cola® and Pepsi®. In the study participated 67 subjects. The first task was to express the opinion
concerning beverages taste (the cups were unmarked). In this trail Pepsi® was chosen as more tasty
drink. The second test was also related to the taste preferences, but this time subjects knew what
they were drinking. It is surprising that the same people who chose Pepsi at first, in this trial
decided to Coca-Cola! The last stage of this study was based on similar assumption data, but
additionally the consumers’ brain activity was tested using magnetic resonance. According to fMRI
Pepsi® selection stimulated brain centres responsible for the reward system (ventromedial prefrontal
cortex (VMPFC)). In the case of the subjects who chose Coca-Cola® quite different brain centres
were activated - the hippocampus and the lateral prefrontal cortex (LPFC), structures responsible
for self-esteem.
Montague proved that the brand choice takes place in the deep structures of consumers’
brains and it is in fact unconscious process.
Peering inside customers’ heads – 3rd method
The next non-invasive method of measuring brain activity applied in neuromarketing is
encephalography (EEG). Encephalograph (instrument that looks like a swimmers cap that holds
imbedded tin electrodes) measures frequencies on the scalp that appear due to cortex neurons’
activity (for example, TV advertisement might be a stimulus) (Figure 2). These frequencies are
related to the waves of different length (1-100Hz). Delta wave (3Hz or below) may occur during the
sleep, alpha wave is evoked by relaxation and beta, when studied persons are alert, anxious or
concentrated [12].
Figure 2 EEG test while watching TV advertisements
Source: Chyłkiewicz J., Co kupuje nasz mózg, Newsweek, April 2007
The EEG method was used to verify the efficiency of the Nivea® brand campaign created by
TBWA Paris which Poles have pleasure to watch this year.
During the „Neuromarketing & Subconsciousness” conference in Sopot (Poland), January
17-18, 2008 professor Rafal Ohme presented how EEG has contributed to the improvement of
Nivea® advertisement. This advertising spot lasted 60seconds. The application of EEG methods
enabled choice of the best scenes which had positive influence on brand perception and proved its
effectiveness. As a result the advertisement’s duration has been shortened to 30s. It is too early to
discuss the effects of the campaign at the moment [7].
Peering inside customers’ heads – 4th method
The measurement of the facial muscles’ electrical potential is surveyed in order to evaluate
reactions to specific advertisements. It is performed using an electromyograph (EMG). Knowing
which muscles represent specific emotions (smile, frown, etc.) it is possible to verify whether
advertisement is perceived positively.
Peering inside customers’ heads – 5th method
Application of different eye tracking technologies allows precise determination of the gaze
points and eye movements when a studied person is looking at the press advertisement.
The first eye tracking methods were applied more than 100 years ago. These techniques
were very invasive then – direct, physical contact with the cornea was essential.
Methods that are applied nowadays are not so drastic. For example electrooculography
(EOG): by applying this technique it is possible to measure the electrical potential difference
between two sides of the eyeball; the photoelectric method: it is based on the physical phenomenon
that enables the measurement of the light reflected by the eye on cornea during eye movements (the
corneal light reflex test); the vision activity screening: the images of eyeball movements are
registered and afterwards digitally processed. The first appliances of the type mentioned above
resembled helmets and were quite uncomfortable to. Appliances used nowadays look like
(un)typical displays which have embedded cameras registering eye movements.
The results of such study have a form of recording which represents the fixation points - that
is the points where the gaze stops and saccades -gaze “jumps”. Afterwards the data of this type is
processed. Depending on the software it is possible to obtain the image that represents fixation
points and its frequency as well as “saccades’ route”. The other form of visualization is a heat map.
Kath Straub, PhD, CUA carried out a study of the Sunsilk® advertisement (Figure 3). He
proved that the application of eye tracking might be helpful in creating better composition –
effective advertisement [13].
Figure 3 Sunsilk® advertisement – before and after modification
Source: http://www.humanfactors.com/downloads/may08.asp#kath
The woman on the left side (Figure 3) looks directly at someone who see this advertisement.
In the right picture the woman peeps at the product. Which version of the advertisement is
effective? Both of them were put to the eye tracking test. The results are presented in the form of
the heat maps (the red colour represents points of the most often fixation).
Figure 4 Sunsilk® advertisement – heat maps
Source: http://www.humanfactors.com/downloads/may08.asp#kath
The heat map (Figure. 4) gives occasion to observe that the sight of the woman on the left
side concentrates the least on the product! It is paradox because this product is the aim of that
advertisement.
The advertisement has been modified in the way that woman looks at the product and for
that reason person who see this advertisements moves the sight on this product (the heat map is the
confirmation).
More and more companies offer such studies, for example Eyetracking Ltd. located in
Warsaw (Poland).
The eye tracing is considered as a method which will become the basic element of marketing
studies or even replace them. The sight is not prone to all kinds of verbal suggestions and that is the
reason why the data obtained in this way is objective.
Case studies
Sony BRAVIA® LCD TV advertisement was one of the most popular in 2007. Swedish
indie folk singer Jose Gonzalez, whose cover of The Knife's “Heartbeats” was the musical setting of
that advertisement, sold much more compact disks just after the broadcasting of that spot. The
advertisement was realized at Gilbert and Leavenworth Street in San Francisco, where were
bouncing 250 thousands of coloured rubber balls. The image was registered by 23 cameras. Lasting
three days photos were supervised by Juan Cabral and Fallon London Agency. Nicolai Fuglsig was
responsible for the direction. Besides the commercial success the authors of that advertisement got
the Palme d'Or („Golden Palm”) at The Cannes Film Festival (June 2006).
Researchers from Laboratory & Co decided to conduct neuromarketing studies in order to
check what has contributed to the success of this advertisement. In the study participated 50
subjects. They were watching Sony BRAVIA® advertisement and in the same time the electrical
activity in their brains (EEG) and skin conductance responses (SCR) were registered. The results
were surprising. The 17th second of the advertisement (Figure 5) caused significant increase in
neurophysiological emotional reaction. It has been proved that it was the reaction to the scene
presenting a frog jumping out of the gutter. What is more this scene has been shot accidentally and
subjects who so the spot were not even conscious of its appearance!
Figure 5 Sony BRAVIA® LCD TV advertisement. The 17th second of the advertisement.
Source: http://testdifferent.com/pdf/Case%20sony%20artykul.pdf
The studies have proved that scenes considered often as insignificant are in fact of the
fundamental importance. In the case of this advertisement the frog was so-called peripheral signal.
Owing to that signal the recipients’ favour has been held till the end of the spot [6] [14].
Summary
The hitherto achievements of neuromarketing are used by concerns such as Coca-Cola,
Procter & Gamble, General Motors, Eastman, Kodak, Nestle [5].
The capabilities of this new discipline make it possible to determine precisely the
consumer’s reaction to specific advertisement (its image, musical setting, slogan or colours).
Neuromarketing enables detection of unconscious consumer’s behaviours. Owing to that, the
company which uses neuromarketing studies to test its advertisements might be certain (in all
probability) that the advertising campaign absorbing large sum of money will be effective.
The usefulness of different neuroimaging methods in neuromarketing researches has been
studied recently – for example positron emission tomography (PET) or Infrared spectroscopy (IR
spectroscopy). Artificial neural networks (ANN) might be used to test the effectiveness of
advertising slogans.
Neuromarketing proves that the effectiveness of advertisement does not correspond to the
popularity of the spot as well as the expenses born by the producers. It corresponds to level of
emotional influence, because from a psychological point of view decisions oriented to purchases
depend on emotions.
According to Robert Heath contribution of psychology to advertisement production will
increase its effectiveness by at least 30%! [9].
Neuromarketing research is undoubtedly the future. It is difficult to evaluate the
effectiveness of this marketing strategy nowadays, because too few studies have been conducted.
References
1. Scios A., Blog: Bez Dekretu, Zabobon “Czwartej Wladzy”, 7 IX 2008r., available online at
http://bezdekretu.blogspot.com/2008/09/zabobon-czwartej-wadzy.html
2. Conversations with History: Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley. Conversation
with Lawrence K. Grossman, available online at
http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/people/Grossman/grossman-con0.html
3. Grossman, L. K., Reshaping Political Values in the Information Age. "Vital Speeches of the
Day", 1997, nr 7
4. Ohme R. K., Homo aeconomicus to pobozne zyczenie, Brief, April 2007
5. Ohme R. K., Zagladamy w glab mozgu. Part 1., Brief, January 2008
6. Bierzynski J., Intuicja na pasku reklamy, Reczpospolita, 21 I 2008r., strona B12
7. Wyganski T., Persfazja w bialym fakrtuchu, Media & Marketing, February 2008
8. Wrabec P., Gra w uwodzenie, Polityka, Poradnik psychologiczny, October 2007
9. Ohme R. K., Reklama z kabaretu, Newsweek, April 2006
10. Laboratory & Co; available online at http://www.lab-oratorium.pl/
11. Samuel M. McClure, Jian Li, Damon Tomlin, Kim S. Cypert, Latané M. Montague and P.
Read Montague, Neural Correlates of Behavioral Preference for Culturally Familiar
Drinks, Neuron, Vol. 44, 379-387, October 14, 2004
12. Encefalografia; available online at http://www.elektroencefalografia.com/
13. Straub K., Look composed – How visuals can draw and drive attention, UI Design
Newsletter, May 2008
14. Reykowska D., Choromanska A., SONY Bravia “The Balls” 2005 reklama “like no other”,
available on line http://testdifferent.com/pdf/Case%20sony%20artykul.pdf
15. Neuromarketing: Beyond branding. The Lancet Neurology, Vol. 3, February 2004
ADVERTISER DO TO SURVIVE THE MEDIA REVOLUTION
Assistant, Master’s degree, Kwiatkowska Joanna, Czestochowa University of Technology, Faculty
of Management, Poland, joanna@zim.pcz.pl
ABSTRACT: “I know half the money I spend on advertising is wasted, I just don’t know which half”
joked John Wanamaker, who created the first department store in 1876 [15]. In spite of the passage
of time Wanamaker’s saying is still in force. However, it may change soon thanks to coming into
being of new discipline – neuromarketing, which is combination of advertisements’ artistry and
sciences (inter alia neuropsychology, cognitive psychology, neuroimaging, cognitive science,
psycholinguistics). Neuromarketing postulates using fMRI, EEG, EMG or eye tracking techniques
for the purpose of recognising consumers’ preferences toward specific goods and brands as well as
mechanisms concerning decision-making process related to purchases. The goal of neuromarketing
is to obtain the information - the human brain’s responses, which marketing stimuli (advertisement)
is effective.
Key words: the media, neuromarketing, advertisement
JEL codes:M3, M37, M39
The media and revolution
The media are inseparable element from our reality [Latin: means, agent]. Their influence
on individual and the whole communities is irrefutable. More than two hundred years ago (1774)
Irish philosopher, Edmund Burke, said: “there were three Estates in Parliament, but in the
Reporters Gallery yonder, there sat a Fourth Estate more important far then they all” [1].
There are a lot of coined terms which describe surrounding world: media civilization
(Tomasz Goban-Klas, Polish sociologist, authority on media), mass culture, mediocracy (Philips),
The Electronic Republic (Lawrence K. Grossman, former president of NBC News and former
president of the Public Broadcasting System [2]).
For every modern firm the main commodity is the information, which comes under the
market mechanism and the law of supply and demand. It is said that there is nowadays the
information economy, information industry, knowledge based society and the information society.
The media undergo greater digitalization with regard to incredible development of the latest
technologies. Lawrence K. Grossman said: „Gutenberg made everybody a reader. Xerox made
everybody a publisher. Interactive telecommunications is making everybody a potential lobbyist.”
[3]. Nowadays everyone who has the Internet access is able to establish own radio station,
television station or newspaper. The competition on the media market is growing – the number of
recipients is limited and the mass media are undergoing the greater fragmentation process. How do
advertisers find themselves in such a situation? The result of the scattered media is the cost rise of
reaching the recipients. Because the media are not uniform, advertisements have to be more
attractive and personalized. More and more popular is direct marketing. Maybe someday there will
be the advertising unit elaborated in detail on the basis of databases, directly addressed to the
specific recipient. In all probability the contents of such advertising unit will be very interesting,
compatible with the social status and lifestyle of every special recipient.
Another problem is the effectiveness of the advertisement and the presence of the science in
its realization. The sources of knowledge, which are the foundations of the modern marketing, are
going back to the fifties last century (sic!). Robert Heath (author of “The Hidden Power of
Advertising” and the founder the Value Creation Company) said, that we live nowadays in “the
advertising stone age” [9]. Since then many domains have been developed, such neuropsychology,
cognitive psychology, neuroimaging, cognitive science psycholinguistics. The attainments of these
domains constitute wealth of information regarding consumers’ consciousness and their behaviours
as well as factors that are influencing on decision-making process oriented to purchases. The
marriage of these sciences and marketing bore fruits in the form of the new discipline –
neuromarketing, which is probably the only one chance of advertisement to survive the media
revolution.
Neuro + marketing
The majority of the widely applied marketing researches consist in direct interviewing,
conducting an opinion poll or carrying out a telephone, magazine, etc. survey and audits. Regardless
of utilized techniques and statistical analysis for interpretation of results, these researches are
unfortunately burdened with error that it is impossible to eliminate using such “out of date”
methods. This error is related to consumers’ declaration. Modern psychology proves that people
very often say one thing and then they do something completely else and what is more they think
otherwise. Professor Gerald Zaltman (Harvard Business School) said: "The world has changed, but
our methods for understanding consumers have not. We keep relying on familiar but ineffective
research techniques and consequently misread consumers' actions and thoughts. The products we
create based on those techniques, simply aren't connecting with consumers" [4]. It was professor
Zaltman who decided in 1998 to take advantage of existing neurobiological technologies in order to
check the activity of these brain parts that refer to the decision-making process [5]. The experiment
consisted in “looking into” the consumer’s brain using MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) and
checking “How consumers think” (it is also the title of professor’s Zaltman book).This is how
neuromarketing came into being.
Professor Zaltman is the person who is regarded as the founder of the first neuromarketing
institute (Harvard University, 1998r.). The term neuromarketing has been coined in 2000 by Ale
Smidts (Erasmus University, Rotterdam). Nowadays there are 12 neuromarketing institutes that are
operating all over the world [10] (Europe, USA). The 13th institute was established in 2007 in
Poland (LAB company in Warsaw founded by professor Rafał K. Ohme, Warsaw School of Social
Sciences and Humanities).
Peering inside customers’ heads – 1st method
One of the easiest neuromarketing tests is based on the basic instrument from the
psychologists’ workbench – measurement of the reaction time. By using personal computer it is
possible to measure how fast studied person will answer the asked question– it is not essential
whether the button “yes” or “no” has been pressed. The reaction time is the neurophysiological
phenomenon and human does not have possible influence on it. It reflects the emotional state and
the motivation of the studied person. The reaction time is useful to verify if studied person perceive
a brand positively as well as its susceptibility to competition’s influence.
Peering inside customers’ heads – 2nd method
It has elapsed more than 35 years since Edward Purcell and Felix Bloch independently
discovered Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) (1945) and before Magnetic Resonance Imaging
(MRI) has been put into clinical practice. This method, which enables obtainment of contrast soft
tissues images and does not expose the patient to ionizing radiation, has revolutionised medical
diagnosis.
The improved version of MRI – fMRI (Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) represents
the energetic economy of the brain (blood oxygenation, glucose combustion - the BOLD effect
(Blood Oxygenation Level Dependent)) which reflects mental processes (the neuroimaging results
are represented in the form of the heat map (Figure 1), where the red colour corresponds to high
activity of the given area). The more a structure is active, the more energy it consumes.
Figure 1 The heat map – the result of neuroimaging (fMRI)
Source: http://digitalspotlight.wordpress.com/2008/03/25/would-you-have-a-few-minutes-for-abrain-
map/
As the topography of the brain centres is known (responsible for happiness, fear, decisionmaking
process, sense of eyesight, hearing and touch, etc.), it is possible to ascertain what emotions
(or if any) has evoked specific advertisements and what was its intensity! Professor Rafal Ohme
said, that application of fMRI consists in “thoughts detection which are still the unknown for our
»ego«.” [6].
In 2004 Daimler AG corporation (formerly DaimlerChrysler), which is the owner of brands
such as Mercedes-Benz®, Smart® and Maybach®, took advantage of fMRI to test what are the men’s
reactions to different car models. The results were surprising: attractive cars cause stimulation of
the same brain regions as faces [9][10].
In the 44th volume of Neuron (October 13, 2004) Read Montague, a neuroscientist at the
Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, TX, USA, published the results of his study [11]. The test
(called the “Pepsi Challenge”) was concerning consumers’ preferences and attitudes toward two
very well-known and nearly identical beverages with regard to the chemical composition: Coca-
Cola® and Pepsi®. In the study participated 67 subjects. The first task was to express the opinion
concerning beverages taste (the cups were unmarked). In this trail Pepsi® was chosen as more tasty
drink. The second test was also related to the taste preferences, but this time subjects knew what
they were drinking. It is surprising that the same people who chose Pepsi at first, in this trial
decided to Coca-Cola! The last stage of this study was based on similar assumption data, but
additionally the consumers’ brain activity was tested using magnetic resonance. According to fMRI
Pepsi® selection stimulated brain centres responsible for the reward system (ventromedial prefrontal
cortex (VMPFC)). In the case of the subjects who chose Coca-Cola® quite different brain centres
were activated - the hippocampus and the lateral prefrontal cortex (LPFC), structures responsible
for self-esteem.
Montague proved that the brand choice takes place in the deep structures of consumers’
brains and it is in fact unconscious process.
Peering inside customers’ heads – 3rd method
The next non-invasive method of measuring brain activity applied in neuromarketing is
encephalography (EEG). Encephalograph (instrument that looks like a swimmers cap that holds
imbedded tin electrodes) measures frequencies on the scalp that appear due to cortex neurons’
activity (for example, TV advertisement might be a stimulus) (Figure 2). These frequencies are
related to the waves of different length (1-100Hz). Delta wave (3Hz or below) may occur during the
sleep, alpha wave is evoked by relaxation and beta, when studied persons are alert, anxious or
concentrated [12].
Figure 2 EEG test while watching TV advertisements
Source: Chyłkiewicz J., Co kupuje nasz mózg, Newsweek, April 2007
The EEG method was used to verify the efficiency of the Nivea® brand campaign created by
TBWA Paris which Poles have pleasure to watch this year.
During the „Neuromarketing & Subconsciousness” conference in Sopot (Poland), January
17-18, 2008 professor Rafal Ohme presented how EEG has contributed to the improvement of
Nivea® advertisement. This advertising spot lasted 60seconds. The application of EEG methods
enabled choice of the best scenes which had positive influence on brand perception and proved its
effectiveness. As a result the advertisement’s duration has been shortened to 30s. It is too early to
discuss the effects of the campaign at the moment [7].
Peering inside customers’ heads – 4th method
The measurement of the facial muscles’ electrical potential is surveyed in order to evaluate
reactions to specific advertisements. It is performed using an electromyograph (EMG). Knowing
which muscles represent specific emotions (smile, frown, etc.) it is possible to verify whether
advertisement is perceived positively.
Peering inside customers’ heads – 5th method
Application of different eye tracking technologies allows precise determination of the gaze
points and eye movements when a studied person is looking at the press advertisement.
The first eye tracking methods were applied more than 100 years ago. These techniques
were very invasive then – direct, physical contact with the cornea was essential.
Methods that are applied nowadays are not so drastic. For example electrooculography
(EOG): by applying this technique it is possible to measure the electrical potential difference
between two sides of the eyeball; the photoelectric method: it is based on the physical phenomenon
that enables the measurement of the light reflected by the eye on cornea during eye movements (the
corneal light reflex test); the vision activity screening: the images of eyeball movements are
registered and afterwards digitally processed. The first appliances of the type mentioned above
resembled helmets and were quite uncomfortable to. Appliances used nowadays look like
(un)typical displays which have embedded cameras registering eye movements.
The results of such study have a form of recording which represents the fixation points - that
is the points where the gaze stops and saccades -gaze “jumps”. Afterwards the data of this type is
processed. Depending on the software it is possible to obtain the image that represents fixation
points and its frequency as well as “saccades’ route”. The other form of visualization is a heat map.
Kath Straub, PhD, CUA carried out a study of the Sunsilk® advertisement (Figure 3). He
proved that the application of eye tracking might be helpful in creating better composition –
effective advertisement [13].
Figure 3 Sunsilk® advertisement – before and after modification
Source: http://www.humanfactors.com/downloads/may08.asp#kath
The woman on the left side (Figure 3) looks directly at someone who see this advertisement.
In the right picture the woman peeps at the product. Which version of the advertisement is
effective? Both of them were put to the eye tracking test. The results are presented in the form of
the heat maps (the red colour represents points of the most often fixation).
Figure 4 Sunsilk® advertisement – heat maps
Source: http://www.humanfactors.com/downloads/may08.asp#kath
The heat map (Figure. 4) gives occasion to observe that the sight of the woman on the left
side concentrates the least on the product! It is paradox because this product is the aim of that
advertisement.
The advertisement has been modified in the way that woman looks at the product and for
that reason person who see this advertisements moves the sight on this product (the heat map is the
confirmation).
More and more companies offer such studies, for example Eyetracking Ltd. located in
Warsaw (Poland).
The eye tracing is considered as a method which will become the basic element of marketing
studies or even replace them. The sight is not prone to all kinds of verbal suggestions and that is the
reason why the data obtained in this way is objective.
Case studies
Sony BRAVIA® LCD TV advertisement was one of the most popular in 2007. Swedish
indie folk singer Jose Gonzalez, whose cover of The Knife's “Heartbeats” was the musical setting of
that advertisement, sold much more compact disks just after the broadcasting of that spot. The
advertisement was realized at Gilbert and Leavenworth Street in San Francisco, where were
bouncing 250 thousands of coloured rubber balls. The image was registered by 23 cameras. Lasting
three days photos were supervised by Juan Cabral and Fallon London Agency. Nicolai Fuglsig was
responsible for the direction. Besides the commercial success the authors of that advertisement got
the Palme d'Or („Golden Palm”) at The Cannes Film Festival (June 2006).
Researchers from Laboratory & Co decided to conduct neuromarketing studies in order to
check what has contributed to the success of this advertisement. In the study participated 50
subjects. They were watching Sony BRAVIA® advertisement and in the same time the electrical
activity in their brains (EEG) and skin conductance responses (SCR) were registered. The results
were surprising. The 17th second of the advertisement (Figure 5) caused significant increase in
neurophysiological emotional reaction. It has been proved that it was the reaction to the scene
presenting a frog jumping out of the gutter. What is more this scene has been shot accidentally and
subjects who so the spot were not even conscious of its appearance!
Figure 5 Sony BRAVIA® LCD TV advertisement. The 17th second of the advertisement.
Source: http://testdifferent.com/pdf/Case%20sony%20artykul.pdf
The studies have proved that scenes considered often as insignificant are in fact of the
fundamental importance. In the case of this advertisement the frog was so-called peripheral signal.
Owing to that signal the recipients’ favour has been held till the end of the spot [6] [14].
Summary
The hitherto achievements of neuromarketing are used by concerns such as Coca-Cola,
Procter & Gamble, General Motors, Eastman, Kodak, Nestle [5].
The capabilities of this new discipline make it possible to determine precisely the
consumer’s reaction to specific advertisement (its image, musical setting, slogan or colours).
Neuromarketing enables detection of unconscious consumer’s behaviours. Owing to that, the
company which uses neuromarketing studies to test its advertisements might be certain (in all
probability) that the advertising campaign absorbing large sum of money will be effective.
The usefulness of different neuroimaging methods in neuromarketing researches has been
studied recently – for example positron emission tomography (PET) or Infrared spectroscopy (IR
spectroscopy). Artificial neural networks (ANN) might be used to test the effectiveness of
advertising slogans.
Neuromarketing proves that the effectiveness of advertisement does not correspond to the
popularity of the spot as well as the expenses born by the producers. It corresponds to level of
emotional influence, because from a psychological point of view decisions oriented to purchases
depend on emotions.
According to Robert Heath contribution of psychology to advertisement production will
increase its effectiveness by at least 30%! [9].
Neuromarketing research is undoubtedly the future. It is difficult to evaluate the
effectiveness of this marketing strategy nowadays, because too few studies have been conducted.
References
1. Scios A., Blog: Bez Dekretu, Zabobon “Czwartej Wladzy”, 7 IX 2008r., available online at
http://bezdekretu.blogspot.com/2008/09/zabobon-czwartej-wadzy.html
2. Conversations with History: Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley. Conversation
with Lawrence K. Grossman, available online at
http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/people/Grossman/grossman-con0.html
3. Grossman, L. K., Reshaping Political Values in the Information Age. "Vital Speeches of the
Day", 1997, nr 7
4. Ohme R. K., Homo aeconomicus to pobozne zyczenie, Brief, April 2007
5. Ohme R. K., Zagladamy w glab mozgu. Part 1., Brief, January 2008
6. Bierzynski J., Intuicja na pasku reklamy, Reczpospolita, 21 I 2008r., strona B12
7. Wyganski T., Persfazja w bialym fakrtuchu, Media & Marketing, February 2008
8. Wrabec P., Gra w uwodzenie, Polityka, Poradnik psychologiczny, October 2007
9. Ohme R. K., Reklama z kabaretu, Newsweek, April 2006
10. Laboratory & Co; available online at http://www.lab-oratorium.pl/
11. Samuel M. McClure, Jian Li, Damon Tomlin, Kim S. Cypert, Latané M. Montague and P.
Read Montague, Neural Correlates of Behavioral Preference for Culturally Familiar
Drinks, Neuron, Vol. 44, 379-387, October 14, 2004
12. Encefalografia; available online at http://www.elektroencefalografia.com/
13. Straub K., Look composed – How visuals can draw and drive attention, UI Design
Newsletter, May 2008
14. Reykowska D., Choromanska A., SONY Bravia “The Balls” 2005 reklama “like no other”,
available on line http://testdifferent.com/pdf/Case%20sony%20artykul.pdf
15. Neuromarketing: Beyond branding. The Lancet Neurology, Vol. 3, February 2004
Is That a Neuromarketer in Your Brain?
RELEASE DATE: January 12, 2006
SOURCE: http://gmj.gallup.com
CONTACT INFORMATION: The Gallup Management Journal
Editorial and Executive Offices
1251 Avenue of the Americas, Suite 2350
New York, NY 10020
(888) 274-5447
G A L L U P
MA N A G E ME N T JO U R N A L
Is That a Neuromarketer in
Your Brain?
An expert on customers explains why
appealing to simple human emotion
beats neuromarketing in the race to
revenue. And he has the pictures to
prove it.
A GMJ Q&A with John Fleming, coauthor of "Manage Your Human
Sigma" (Harvard Business Review, July-August 2005)
Neuromarketing is a concept based on fact plus a lot of assumptions
-- and surrounded by a little fear. The fact is that the human brain
responds to images and words, which is why advertising works. The
assumption is that marketers, by using high-tech neurological
equipment such as fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging)
machines that trace brain activity, could create more successful ads.
The fear is that use of that knowledge could do more than stoke
interest in a product -- it could more or less compel interest.
But does
neuromarketing even work? And is it ethical? Maybe and maybe not,
says John Fleming, Ph.D., a Gallup principal and chief scientist for
customer engagement and HumanSigma -- a management approach
that helps organizations boost financial performance by assessing,
managing, and improving the employee-customer encounter.
managing, and improving the employee-customer encounter.
So what was Dr. Fleming doing in Tokyo last year, standing over an
fMRI machine collecting brain scans of 16 of that city's shoppers?
Dr. Fleming is also one of a team of scientists who researched and
developed CE11, Gallup's metric of customer engagement, which
differentiates between consumers' deep emotional attachment and
mere satisfaction. Boosting profitability by increasing emotional
response sounds a lot like neuromarketing, right? According to Dr.
Fleming, it's not. And in this interview, he discusses his take on
neuromarketing, explains how increasing positive emotion is both
profitable and ethical, and tells what he discovered in Tokyo.
GMJ: What's your take on neuromarketing?
Dr. Fleming: It's really an area that is in its infancy, and it has
attracted both strong proponents and big critics. Within the academic
community, the scuttlebutt that I've heard from neuroscientists is that
neuromarketing runs the risk of being perceived as a sham science.
It's being criticized on those grounds.
GMJ: Why?
Fleming: I'm not sure that anyone has conclusively demonstrated that
neuromarketing works, and many neuroscientists doubt it can. But
that sidesteps the ethical considerations. Regardless of whether it
works or not, there's a fear that it could. There's a kind of Big
Brother, 1984, scary aspect to it. The basic premise is that there are
neurological triggers that marketers can use to further embed their
brand, and the frightening dimension is that the targets don't know
they're being targeted and manipulated. So the idea that marketers
could get access to information about what makes things happen in
your brain and manipulate you without your knowledge is scary to a
lot of folks. Has it been done? I don't think it has. Could it be? It's
conceivable.
GMJ: But isn't marketing itself a configuration of words and images
meant to embed brands? Isn't that the whole idea?
Fleming: Yes, but it's always been assumed that there was some sort
of thoughtful mediation or reflection involved. There are people who
believe that, for example, Ronald Reagan got elected because he was
very clever in his use of the American flag in every one of his ads
and those images somehow connected him with American values.
But no one would argue that the flags drove anyone to vote for
Reagan; they just provided a strong image. So, there are people who
say that neuromarketing is merely another extension of what we've
been trying to do all along, which is get inside the heads of people.
The
pushback is
that words
and images
have never
been shown
to actually
produce
organic
changes in
changes in
the brain,
which is the goal of neuromarketing. There has been a belief,
however unfounded, that marketing involved some kind of thoughtful
mediation between advertisers and consumers: The target actually
had to think about the ad or the product, at least a little bit, then do
something. But the specter raised with neuromarketing is the
possibility that what marketers know about the things that can
change a consumer's brain gives them an inside advantage that the
consumer can't counter.
GMJ: So with neuromarketing, marketers are basically trying to find
a way to ring the bell that makes Pavlov's dog salivate.
Fleming: Right, exactly -- but without doing all the conditioning
usually required to elicit a response. Our intent with the Tokyo study,
in contrast, was to go in a totally different direction. We didn't want
to join the fray of neuromarketing. Instead, we wanted to
demonstrate that creating certain conditions -- beliefs or feelings or
emotions -- causes, or at least is related to, people thinking
differently about a product and a company. And we wanted to
understand the link between those conditions and future behavior. We
weren't interested in using this understanding for the same purposes
as neuromarketers. We were trying to validate a set of attitude
measures that could be used to proactively manage a business.
GMJ: So
tell me
about the
Tokyo study.
Fleming:
First, six to
eight weeks
before the
experiment,
we recruited
customers from the general Tokyo metropolitan area who shopped at
an upscale retailer in Tokyo. We interviewed some four hundred
people, and our goal was to identify three different groups of
customers: a group of highly engaged customers, a group that was
less engaged, and a group that was essentially neutral to negative. In
the end, we studied sixteen women. We chose women for this study
because there are demonstrated differences in brain structure between
men and women, and when you mix genders, you introduce a source
of bias into the results.
Then we asked the participants to come to the lab and lie inside an
fMRI machine, and we scanned their brains as they responded to a
series of questions. We asked the CE11 metric questions about the
retailer plus some other related questions, a similar set of questions
about their bank, and questions about their everyday life -- the last
two sets were the control questions. What we wanted to know was
whether higher levels of engagement with the retailer were related to
different levels of processing activity in certain specific parts of the
brain related to emotion. (See sidebar "L3 + A8 = CE11: Questions
That Get at the Heart of Customer Engagement.")
GMJ: And what did you find?
Fleming: Well, we found that the higher the level of engagement,
the more activity occurred in three specific areas of the brain: the
orbitalfrontal cortex, which is where emotion and cognition are
integrated; the temporal pole, which is one area for accessing
memory; and interestingly, the fusiform gyrus, which is implicated in
facial recognition. So, the initial hypothesis was that the more
engaged customers are, the more actively they pull out memories --
and that their thinking process involves faces. The hypothesis was
that they were probably recollecting an experience they'd had at the
retailer, and at the same time, they were more active in integrating
emotional and cognitive information.
Now that was
the result for the
overall measure
of customer
engagement.
When we
looked more
closely at those
who scored high
on questions
related to their
"Passion" for
the retailer, two
additional areas
of the brain lit
up. [See sidebar
"Levels of
Customer
Engagement."]
The first was
the amygdala,
which is the
area associated
with emotional
processing. The
second area was
the anterior
cingulate gyrus,
which is
implicated in binary decisions -- for example, decisions about what is
good or bad. So those customers who had intensely strong feelings of
attachment to the retailer also showed enhanced activity in the
amygdala, which is the emotional storehouse, as well as the area
involved in good/bad decision making. The implication is that their
brains were firing off on a lot of emotional content.
GMJ: So the parts of the brain that activate when you're
remembering a person you love also light up when you're thinking
about a brand you love? In other words, to the amygdala, love is
love, whether it's love for a spouse or a brand of toothpaste. That's
pretty powerful. Is that why you were interested?
Fleming: Well, this research was important to us because, with its
CE11 metric, Gallup makes the claim that emotion mediates the
relationship between a customer and a company, and that emotion
relationship between a customer and a company, and that emotion
mediates that customer's ultimate behavior. So it's important to show
that emotion at an organic level is involved and not just something
else.
Now here's the important point: When we looked at customer
responses to the three CE11 questions that measure traditional
indicators of attitudinal loyalty -- I intend to purchase or visit again, I
would recommend, and I'm satisfied -- we didn't find any enhanced
brain activity, no matter how loyal or disloyal the customer might
have been. But we saw a lot of brain activity associated with the
eight CE11 questions that measure emotional, rather than cognitive,
attachment. In other words, we saw engagement rather than
satisfaction.
GMJ: That's a reversal, considering how much money businesses
pour into customer satisfaction measures.
Fleming: People have always assumed that satisfaction was the right
measure. They assume that measures of "employee satisfaction"
work, and they assume that measures of "customer satisfaction" work
too. No one bothered to step back and ask, "Are we asking the right
questions?" No one questioned the link between the question and the
behavior. When we began delving into the link between the question
and the behavior, we found that satisfaction didn't do a very good job
of predicting how people actually behaved.
So how do
we know
now that
we're asking
the right
questions?
Well, we
know we're
asking the
right
questions
because at an aggregate level, the questions relate to actual behavior.
And we've demonstrated that result hundreds of times in our data, but
now we can actually see those results happen in the brain. The
importance of this study is that it allows us to show an organic effect
that mediates the engagement measures we collect. And this is
important, because we collect these measures in advance of financial
performance measures. Emotional engagement measures are leading
indicators of consumer behavior that companies hope to influence in
the future.
GMJ: What do you mean by "leading indicators"?
Fleming: Let me ask you a question. How do you know if a
company is successful?
GMJ: If its revenue is healthy, if it's increasing employment, or if its
share price is going up.
Fleming: That's what most people would say. But think about it for a
moment. Those measures show that your company is succeeding after
the fact, right? Those indicators show that your company has been
the fact, right? Those indicators show that your company has been
successful, but not that it still is or will be. A leading indicator is
useful because it allows corporate leaders to anticipate the need for
change before it shows up in outcomes that can't be changed. You
can't steer the car by looking in the rearview mirror.
Today, we may look at our corporate balance sheet and decide our
company is healthy, but we have no idea whether it's going to stay
that way in the future. The outcomes that business cares about are
revenue, growth, and profitability. So the search began for things that
would serve as an early-warning system to tell us if our company's
health was in jeopardy long before it ever showed up on the balance
sheet.
What the CE11 metric does is give businesses that forward look.
What the Tokyo study does is show how that forward look works.
Engagement is that forward look, because engagement triggers
customer behavior that's positive toward the brand. Now in the
Tokyo study, there was a very strong relationship between our
measure of attachment and actual spending (a correlation of about .6
on a scale of 0 to 1). What that says is the higher the score on
attachment, the more they spend.
GMJ: How does a business increase that attachment, that
engagement?
Fleming: You first have to understand that attachment is an
emotional connection. Then you need to begin to identify activities
that drive that emotional connection. And though those activities will
be unique for every business model within an industry, those levers
can be determined statistically.
One of the most potent levers is the interaction that customers have
with your staff. So help your employees understand how to maximize
the emotional benefits they can deliver each and every time they
interact with a customer -- it's a powerful creator of value. [See
"Marketers: Don't Ignore Your Company's Employees" and "Living
the Brand" in the "See Also" area on this page.]
A lot of customer service training has been about execution, steps,
behaviors, transacting. It needs to evolve to a new platform, one that
says the transaction and the execution are the minimal acceptable
outcomes and that the customer actually expects more than simply
transactions. That's a first step. Another way to improve is to go into
your organization and identify those locations where that engagement
is already happening. Use them as a source of solutions for the rest
of the company.
GMJ: So every company already has a blueprint; they just have to
look for it.
Fleming: That's exactly right. But here's the key: Up until a few
years ago, business leaders made the assumption that certain leading
indicators were valid, notably employee satisfaction and customer
satisfaction. They didn't really bother to check whether high
performance on this or that indicator was actually related to future
good performance on the things they cared about -- growth, revenue,
and profitability. But it turns out that customer satisfaction is the low
bar of performance. Satisfied customers don't stay with companies;
bar of performance. Satisfied customers don't stay with companies;
they aren't more profitable, and they don't deliver value to the
company.
The difference between satisfaction and engagement is that
engagement includes an understanding of the crucial emotional
connection that ultimately drives customer behavior. And we know
that it drives customer behavior because we've done the linkage work
that proves that the more engaged a customer is, the more value he or
she delivers to a company. Engaged customers deliver increased
purchasing, increased share of wallet, higher levels of profitability,
deeper cross-sell, willingness to try different options, new products,
and importantly, a reduced cost to service. I saw all that happen in
someone's brain, and I'll tell you, it's a powerful thing to see.
L3 + A8 = CE11:
Questions That Get at the Heart of Customer Engagement
CE11 measures three key factors pertaining to a customer's rational
assessment of a brand (L3) but also adds eight questions on
emotional attachment (A8).
L3
• Overall, how satisfied are you with [Brand]?
• How likely are you to continue to choose/repurchase/repeat (if
needed) [Brand]?
• How likely are you to recommend [Brand] to a friend/associate?
A8
CONFIDENCE
• [Brand] is a name I can always trust.
• [Brand] always delivers on what they promise.
INTEGRITY
• [Brand] always treats me fairly.
• If a problem arises, I can always count on [Brand] to reach a fair
and satisfactory resolution.
PRIDE
• I feel proud to be a [Brand] [customer/shopper/user/owner].
• [Brand] always treats me with respect.
PASSION
• [Brand] is the perfect [company/product/brand/store] for people
like me.
• I can't imagine a world without [Brand].
Copyright © 1994-2000 The Gallup Organization, Princeton, NJ.
All rights reserved.
-- Interviewed by Jennifer Robison
The CE11 items are protected by copyright of The Gallup
Organization, Princeton, NJ, 1994-2000. All rights reserved.
MORE INFORMATION
Married to the Brand, by William J. McEwen, tells the story of
what makes profitable brand relationships work -- through the eyes
of the consumer, not the marketer.
Packed with stories and compelling discoveries from a worldwide
consumer database, this book explores why people form deep
emotional connections with some brands and not others.
Order Now
During the Married to the Brand Web event, William McEwen
explains why people bond with some brands and not others. His
insights draw on 60 years of Gallup Organization research into
consumer psychology, and he shows how emotional connections can
be measured and managed.
This 90-minute virtual seminar event was presented on Wednesday,
April 19, 2006. You may purchase a CD-ROM containing both the
audio and visual components of the program for $295.
To order a CD of this presentation, click here. For more information,
contact David Osborne at 202-715-3200.
To learn how Gallup can help your company increase the power and
performance of its brand, visit the Brand Management area on the
Gallup Consulting Web site.
Copyright © 2006 The Gallup Organization, Princeton, NJ. All
rights reserved. Gallup®, A8TM, Business Impact AnalysisTM,
CE11®, Clifton StrengthsFinderTM, the 34 Clifton StrengthsFinder
theme names, Customer Engagement IndexTM, Drop ClubTM,
Emotional EconomyTM, Employee Engagement IndexTM, Employee
Outlook IndexTM, Follow This PathTM, Gallup BrainTM, Gallup
ConsultingTM, Gallup Management Journal®, GMJ®, Gallup
PressTM, Gallup PublishingTM, Gallup Tuesday Briefing®, Gallup
UniversityTM, HumanSigma®, I10TM, L3TM, PrincipalInsightTM,
Q12®, SE25TM, SF34®, SRI®, Strengths SpotlightTM, Strengths-Based
SellingTM, StrengthsCoachTM, StrengthsFinder®, StrengthsQuestTM,
TeacherInsightTM, The Gallup Path®, and The Gallup Poll® are
TeacherInsightTM, The Gallup Path®, and The Gallup Poll® are
trademarks of The Gallup Organization. All other trademarks are the
property of their respective owners. These materials are provided for
noncommercial, personal use only. Reproduction prohibited without
the express permission of The Gallup Organization.
SOURCE: http://gmj.gallup.com
CONTACT INFORMATION: The Gallup Management Journal
Editorial and Executive Offices
1251 Avenue of the Americas, Suite 2350
New York, NY 10020
(888) 274-5447
G A L L U P
MA N A G E ME N T JO U R N A L
Is That a Neuromarketer in
Your Brain?
An expert on customers explains why
appealing to simple human emotion
beats neuromarketing in the race to
revenue. And he has the pictures to
prove it.
A GMJ Q&A with John Fleming, coauthor of "Manage Your Human
Sigma" (Harvard Business Review, July-August 2005)
Neuromarketing is a concept based on fact plus a lot of assumptions
-- and surrounded by a little fear. The fact is that the human brain
responds to images and words, which is why advertising works. The
assumption is that marketers, by using high-tech neurological
equipment such as fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging)
machines that trace brain activity, could create more successful ads.
The fear is that use of that knowledge could do more than stoke
interest in a product -- it could more or less compel interest.
But does
neuromarketing even work? And is it ethical? Maybe and maybe not,
says John Fleming, Ph.D., a Gallup principal and chief scientist for
customer engagement and HumanSigma -- a management approach
that helps organizations boost financial performance by assessing,
managing, and improving the employee-customer encounter.
managing, and improving the employee-customer encounter.
So what was Dr. Fleming doing in Tokyo last year, standing over an
fMRI machine collecting brain scans of 16 of that city's shoppers?
Dr. Fleming is also one of a team of scientists who researched and
developed CE11, Gallup's metric of customer engagement, which
differentiates between consumers' deep emotional attachment and
mere satisfaction. Boosting profitability by increasing emotional
response sounds a lot like neuromarketing, right? According to Dr.
Fleming, it's not. And in this interview, he discusses his take on
neuromarketing, explains how increasing positive emotion is both
profitable and ethical, and tells what he discovered in Tokyo.
GMJ: What's your take on neuromarketing?
Dr. Fleming: It's really an area that is in its infancy, and it has
attracted both strong proponents and big critics. Within the academic
community, the scuttlebutt that I've heard from neuroscientists is that
neuromarketing runs the risk of being perceived as a sham science.
It's being criticized on those grounds.
GMJ: Why?
Fleming: I'm not sure that anyone has conclusively demonstrated that
neuromarketing works, and many neuroscientists doubt it can. But
that sidesteps the ethical considerations. Regardless of whether it
works or not, there's a fear that it could. There's a kind of Big
Brother, 1984, scary aspect to it. The basic premise is that there are
neurological triggers that marketers can use to further embed their
brand, and the frightening dimension is that the targets don't know
they're being targeted and manipulated. So the idea that marketers
could get access to information about what makes things happen in
your brain and manipulate you without your knowledge is scary to a
lot of folks. Has it been done? I don't think it has. Could it be? It's
conceivable.
GMJ: But isn't marketing itself a configuration of words and images
meant to embed brands? Isn't that the whole idea?
Fleming: Yes, but it's always been assumed that there was some sort
of thoughtful mediation or reflection involved. There are people who
believe that, for example, Ronald Reagan got elected because he was
very clever in his use of the American flag in every one of his ads
and those images somehow connected him with American values.
But no one would argue that the flags drove anyone to vote for
Reagan; they just provided a strong image. So, there are people who
say that neuromarketing is merely another extension of what we've
been trying to do all along, which is get inside the heads of people.
The
pushback is
that words
and images
have never
been shown
to actually
produce
organic
changes in
changes in
the brain,
which is the goal of neuromarketing. There has been a belief,
however unfounded, that marketing involved some kind of thoughtful
mediation between advertisers and consumers: The target actually
had to think about the ad or the product, at least a little bit, then do
something. But the specter raised with neuromarketing is the
possibility that what marketers know about the things that can
change a consumer's brain gives them an inside advantage that the
consumer can't counter.
GMJ: So with neuromarketing, marketers are basically trying to find
a way to ring the bell that makes Pavlov's dog salivate.
Fleming: Right, exactly -- but without doing all the conditioning
usually required to elicit a response. Our intent with the Tokyo study,
in contrast, was to go in a totally different direction. We didn't want
to join the fray of neuromarketing. Instead, we wanted to
demonstrate that creating certain conditions -- beliefs or feelings or
emotions -- causes, or at least is related to, people thinking
differently about a product and a company. And we wanted to
understand the link between those conditions and future behavior. We
weren't interested in using this understanding for the same purposes
as neuromarketers. We were trying to validate a set of attitude
measures that could be used to proactively manage a business.
GMJ: So
tell me
about the
Tokyo study.
Fleming:
First, six to
eight weeks
before the
experiment,
we recruited
customers from the general Tokyo metropolitan area who shopped at
an upscale retailer in Tokyo. We interviewed some four hundred
people, and our goal was to identify three different groups of
customers: a group of highly engaged customers, a group that was
less engaged, and a group that was essentially neutral to negative. In
the end, we studied sixteen women. We chose women for this study
because there are demonstrated differences in brain structure between
men and women, and when you mix genders, you introduce a source
of bias into the results.
Then we asked the participants to come to the lab and lie inside an
fMRI machine, and we scanned their brains as they responded to a
series of questions. We asked the CE11 metric questions about the
retailer plus some other related questions, a similar set of questions
about their bank, and questions about their everyday life -- the last
two sets were the control questions. What we wanted to know was
whether higher levels of engagement with the retailer were related to
different levels of processing activity in certain specific parts of the
brain related to emotion. (See sidebar "L3 + A8 = CE11: Questions
That Get at the Heart of Customer Engagement.")
GMJ: And what did you find?
Fleming: Well, we found that the higher the level of engagement,
the more activity occurred in three specific areas of the brain: the
orbitalfrontal cortex, which is where emotion and cognition are
integrated; the temporal pole, which is one area for accessing
memory; and interestingly, the fusiform gyrus, which is implicated in
facial recognition. So, the initial hypothesis was that the more
engaged customers are, the more actively they pull out memories --
and that their thinking process involves faces. The hypothesis was
that they were probably recollecting an experience they'd had at the
retailer, and at the same time, they were more active in integrating
emotional and cognitive information.
Now that was
the result for the
overall measure
of customer
engagement.
When we
looked more
closely at those
who scored high
on questions
related to their
"Passion" for
the retailer, two
additional areas
of the brain lit
up. [See sidebar
"Levels of
Customer
Engagement."]
The first was
the amygdala,
which is the
area associated
with emotional
processing. The
second area was
the anterior
cingulate gyrus,
which is
implicated in binary decisions -- for example, decisions about what is
good or bad. So those customers who had intensely strong feelings of
attachment to the retailer also showed enhanced activity in the
amygdala, which is the emotional storehouse, as well as the area
involved in good/bad decision making. The implication is that their
brains were firing off on a lot of emotional content.
GMJ: So the parts of the brain that activate when you're
remembering a person you love also light up when you're thinking
about a brand you love? In other words, to the amygdala, love is
love, whether it's love for a spouse or a brand of toothpaste. That's
pretty powerful. Is that why you were interested?
Fleming: Well, this research was important to us because, with its
CE11 metric, Gallup makes the claim that emotion mediates the
relationship between a customer and a company, and that emotion
relationship between a customer and a company, and that emotion
mediates that customer's ultimate behavior. So it's important to show
that emotion at an organic level is involved and not just something
else.
Now here's the important point: When we looked at customer
responses to the three CE11 questions that measure traditional
indicators of attitudinal loyalty -- I intend to purchase or visit again, I
would recommend, and I'm satisfied -- we didn't find any enhanced
brain activity, no matter how loyal or disloyal the customer might
have been. But we saw a lot of brain activity associated with the
eight CE11 questions that measure emotional, rather than cognitive,
attachment. In other words, we saw engagement rather than
satisfaction.
GMJ: That's a reversal, considering how much money businesses
pour into customer satisfaction measures.
Fleming: People have always assumed that satisfaction was the right
measure. They assume that measures of "employee satisfaction"
work, and they assume that measures of "customer satisfaction" work
too. No one bothered to step back and ask, "Are we asking the right
questions?" No one questioned the link between the question and the
behavior. When we began delving into the link between the question
and the behavior, we found that satisfaction didn't do a very good job
of predicting how people actually behaved.
So how do
we know
now that
we're asking
the right
questions?
Well, we
know we're
asking the
right
questions
because at an aggregate level, the questions relate to actual behavior.
And we've demonstrated that result hundreds of times in our data, but
now we can actually see those results happen in the brain. The
importance of this study is that it allows us to show an organic effect
that mediates the engagement measures we collect. And this is
important, because we collect these measures in advance of financial
performance measures. Emotional engagement measures are leading
indicators of consumer behavior that companies hope to influence in
the future.
GMJ: What do you mean by "leading indicators"?
Fleming: Let me ask you a question. How do you know if a
company is successful?
GMJ: If its revenue is healthy, if it's increasing employment, or if its
share price is going up.
Fleming: That's what most people would say. But think about it for a
moment. Those measures show that your company is succeeding after
the fact, right? Those indicators show that your company has been
the fact, right? Those indicators show that your company has been
successful, but not that it still is or will be. A leading indicator is
useful because it allows corporate leaders to anticipate the need for
change before it shows up in outcomes that can't be changed. You
can't steer the car by looking in the rearview mirror.
Today, we may look at our corporate balance sheet and decide our
company is healthy, but we have no idea whether it's going to stay
that way in the future. The outcomes that business cares about are
revenue, growth, and profitability. So the search began for things that
would serve as an early-warning system to tell us if our company's
health was in jeopardy long before it ever showed up on the balance
sheet.
What the CE11 metric does is give businesses that forward look.
What the Tokyo study does is show how that forward look works.
Engagement is that forward look, because engagement triggers
customer behavior that's positive toward the brand. Now in the
Tokyo study, there was a very strong relationship between our
measure of attachment and actual spending (a correlation of about .6
on a scale of 0 to 1). What that says is the higher the score on
attachment, the more they spend.
GMJ: How does a business increase that attachment, that
engagement?
Fleming: You first have to understand that attachment is an
emotional connection. Then you need to begin to identify activities
that drive that emotional connection. And though those activities will
be unique for every business model within an industry, those levers
can be determined statistically.
One of the most potent levers is the interaction that customers have
with your staff. So help your employees understand how to maximize
the emotional benefits they can deliver each and every time they
interact with a customer -- it's a powerful creator of value. [See
"Marketers: Don't Ignore Your Company's Employees" and "Living
the Brand" in the "See Also" area on this page.]
A lot of customer service training has been about execution, steps,
behaviors, transacting. It needs to evolve to a new platform, one that
says the transaction and the execution are the minimal acceptable
outcomes and that the customer actually expects more than simply
transactions. That's a first step. Another way to improve is to go into
your organization and identify those locations where that engagement
is already happening. Use them as a source of solutions for the rest
of the company.
GMJ: So every company already has a blueprint; they just have to
look for it.
Fleming: That's exactly right. But here's the key: Up until a few
years ago, business leaders made the assumption that certain leading
indicators were valid, notably employee satisfaction and customer
satisfaction. They didn't really bother to check whether high
performance on this or that indicator was actually related to future
good performance on the things they cared about -- growth, revenue,
and profitability. But it turns out that customer satisfaction is the low
bar of performance. Satisfied customers don't stay with companies;
bar of performance. Satisfied customers don't stay with companies;
they aren't more profitable, and they don't deliver value to the
company.
The difference between satisfaction and engagement is that
engagement includes an understanding of the crucial emotional
connection that ultimately drives customer behavior. And we know
that it drives customer behavior because we've done the linkage work
that proves that the more engaged a customer is, the more value he or
she delivers to a company. Engaged customers deliver increased
purchasing, increased share of wallet, higher levels of profitability,
deeper cross-sell, willingness to try different options, new products,
and importantly, a reduced cost to service. I saw all that happen in
someone's brain, and I'll tell you, it's a powerful thing to see.
L3 + A8 = CE11:
Questions That Get at the Heart of Customer Engagement
CE11 measures three key factors pertaining to a customer's rational
assessment of a brand (L3) but also adds eight questions on
emotional attachment (A8).
L3
• Overall, how satisfied are you with [Brand]?
• How likely are you to continue to choose/repurchase/repeat (if
needed) [Brand]?
• How likely are you to recommend [Brand] to a friend/associate?
A8
CONFIDENCE
• [Brand] is a name I can always trust.
• [Brand] always delivers on what they promise.
INTEGRITY
• [Brand] always treats me fairly.
• If a problem arises, I can always count on [Brand] to reach a fair
and satisfactory resolution.
PRIDE
• I feel proud to be a [Brand] [customer/shopper/user/owner].
• [Brand] always treats me with respect.
PASSION
• [Brand] is the perfect [company/product/brand/store] for people
like me.
• I can't imagine a world without [Brand].
Copyright © 1994-2000 The Gallup Organization, Princeton, NJ.
All rights reserved.
-- Interviewed by Jennifer Robison
The CE11 items are protected by copyright of The Gallup
Organization, Princeton, NJ, 1994-2000. All rights reserved.
MORE INFORMATION
Married to the Brand, by William J. McEwen, tells the story of
what makes profitable brand relationships work -- through the eyes
of the consumer, not the marketer.
Packed with stories and compelling discoveries from a worldwide
consumer database, this book explores why people form deep
emotional connections with some brands and not others.
Order Now
During the Married to the Brand Web event, William McEwen
explains why people bond with some brands and not others. His
insights draw on 60 years of Gallup Organization research into
consumer psychology, and he shows how emotional connections can
be measured and managed.
This 90-minute virtual seminar event was presented on Wednesday,
April 19, 2006. You may purchase a CD-ROM containing both the
audio and visual components of the program for $295.
To order a CD of this presentation, click here. For more information,
contact David Osborne at 202-715-3200.
To learn how Gallup can help your company increase the power and
performance of its brand, visit the Brand Management area on the
Gallup Consulting Web site.
Copyright © 2006 The Gallup Organization, Princeton, NJ. All
rights reserved. Gallup®, A8TM, Business Impact AnalysisTM,
CE11®, Clifton StrengthsFinderTM, the 34 Clifton StrengthsFinder
theme names, Customer Engagement IndexTM, Drop ClubTM,
Emotional EconomyTM, Employee Engagement IndexTM, Employee
Outlook IndexTM, Follow This PathTM, Gallup BrainTM, Gallup
ConsultingTM, Gallup Management Journal®, GMJ®, Gallup
PressTM, Gallup PublishingTM, Gallup Tuesday Briefing®, Gallup
UniversityTM, HumanSigma®, I10TM, L3TM, PrincipalInsightTM,
Q12®, SE25TM, SF34®, SRI®, Strengths SpotlightTM, Strengths-Based
SellingTM, StrengthsCoachTM, StrengthsFinder®, StrengthsQuestTM,
TeacherInsightTM, The Gallup Path®, and The Gallup Poll® are
TeacherInsightTM, The Gallup Path®, and The Gallup Poll® are
trademarks of The Gallup Organization. All other trademarks are the
property of their respective owners. These materials are provided for
noncommercial, personal use only. Reproduction prohibited without
the express permission of The Gallup Organization.
What Neuroscience Tells Us About Consumer Desire
RESEARCH & IDEAS
What Neuroscience Tells Us
About Consumer Desire
Published: March 26, 2012
Author: Carmen Nobel
It's easy for businesses to keep track of what
we buy, but harder to figure out why. Enter a
nascent field called neuromarketing, which uses
the tools of neuroscience to determine why we
prefer some products over others. Uma R.
Karmarkar explains how raw brain data is
helping researchers unlock the mysteries of
consumer choice. Key concepts include:
• When tracking brain functions,
neuroscientists generally use either
electroencephalography (EEG) or
functional magnetic resonance imaging
(fMRI) technology. EEG measures
fluctuations in the electrical activity directly
below the scalp, while fMRI tracks blood
flow throughout the brain.
• Studies have shown activity in that brain
area can predict the future popularity of a
product or experience.
• For businesses planning to outsource
neuromarketing services, Karmarkar
advises seeking out a firm that was founded
by a scientist, or one that has a strong
science advisory board.
In the early 1950s, two scientists at McGill
University inadvertently discovered an area of
the rodent brain dubbed "the pleasure center,"
located deep in the nucleus accumbens. When a
group of lab rats had the opportunity to
stimulate their own pleasure centers via a
lever-activated electrical current, they pressed
the lever over and over again, hundreds of times
per hour, foregoing food or sleep, until many of
them dropped dead from exhaustion. Further
research found pleasure centers exist in human
brains, too.
"People are fairly good at
expressing what they want,
what they like, or even how
much they will pay for an
item. But they aren't very
good at accessing where
that value comes from, or
how and when it is
influenced by factors like
store displays or brands."
Most humans are a little more complicated
than rats, of course. But we are largely
motivated by what makes us feel good,
especially when it comes to our purchasing
decisions. To that end, many major corporations
have begun to take special interest in how
understanding the human brain can help them
better understand consumers. Enter a nascent
but fast-growing field called neuromarketing,
which uses brain-tracking tools to determine
why we prefer some products over others.
"People are fairly good at expressing what
they want, what they like, or even how much
they will pay for an item," says Uma R.
Karmarkar, an assistant professor at Harvard
Business School who sports PhDs in both
marketing and neuroscience. "But they aren't
very good at accessing where that value comes
from, or how and when it is influenced by
factors like store displays or brands.
[Neuroscience] can help us understand those
hidden elements of the decision process."
To be sure, there is a clear difference
between the goals of academia and the goals of
a corporation in utilizing neuroscience. For
Karmarkar, her work falls into the category of
decision neuroscience, which is the study of
what our brains do as we make choices. She
harbors no motive other than to understand that
process and its implications for behavior, and
draws on concepts and techniques from
neuroscience to inform her research in
marketing.
For corporations, on the other hand, the
science is a means to an end goal of selling
more stuff. But the tools, once restricted to
biomedical research, are largely the same. And
Karmarkar expects brain data to play a key role
in future research on consumer choice.
(In a recent HBS industry background note
on neuromarketing, she discusses the
techniques that have helped researchers decode
secrets such as why people love artificially
colored snack food and how to predict whether
a pop song will be a hit or a flop.)
Tricks of the trade
When tracking brain functions,
neuroscientists generally use either
electroencephalography (EEG) or functional
magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)
technology. EEG measures fluctuations in the
electrical activity directly below the scalp,
which occurs as a result of neural activity. By
attaching electrodes to subjects' heads and
evaluating the electrical patterns of their brain
waves, researchers can track the intensity of
visceral responses such as anger, lust, disgust,
and excitement.
Karmarkar cites the example of junk-food
giant Frito-Lay, which in 2008 hired a
neuromarketing firm to look into how
consumers respond to Cheetos, the top-selling
brand of cheese puffs in the United States.
Using EEG technology on a group of willing
subjects, the firm determined that consumers
respond strongly to the fact that eating Cheetos
turns their fingers orange with residual cheese
dust. In her note, Karmarkar cites an article in
the August 2011 issue of Fast Company, which
describes how the EEG patterns indicated "a
sense of giddy subversion that consumers enjoy
over the messiness of the product."
That data in hand, Frito-Lay moved ahead
with an ad campaign called "The Orange
Underground," featuring a series of 30-second
TV spots in which the Cheetos mascot, Chester
Cheetah, encourages consumers to commit
subversive acts with Cheetos. (In one
commercial, an airline passenger quietly sticks
Cheetos up the nostrils of a snoring seatmate.
Problem solved.) The campaign garnered
Frito-Lay a 2009 Grand Ogilvy Award from the
Advertising Research Foundation.
COPYRIGHT 2012 PRESIDENT AND FELLOWS OF HARVARD COLLEGE 1
EEG vs. fMRI
Karmarkar notes that EEG and fMRI have
different strengths and weaknesses, and that
EEG has some limitations in its reach. "The cap
of electrodes sits on the surface of your head, so
you're never going to get to the deep areas of
the brain with EEG," Karmarkar explains.
The fMRI uses a giant magnet, often 3
Teslas strong, to track the blood flow
throughout the brain as test subjects respond to
visual, audio, or even taste cues. The
technology has its own logistical limitations.
Running an fMRI scanner costs researchers up
to $1,000 per hour, and studies often use 20-30
subjects, Karmarkar says. And while EEG lets
subjects move around during testing, fMRI
requires them to lie very still inside a machine
that can be intimidating.
"This is a sophisticated piece of medical
equipment that exerts a very strong magnetic
field at all times, and it's important to be very
careful around it," Karmarkar says. "For
example, you cannot take metal into a magnet
room!"
"Expressions of happiness
in some Eastern cultures
are expressed as a sense of
calm or peace, whereas in
some Western cultures,
happiness means jumping
around with joy and
excitement."
But fMRI is invaluable to neuroscience and
neuromarketing in that it gives researchers a
view into the aforementioned pleasure center.
"The more desirable something is, the more
significant the changes in blood flow in that
part of the brain," Karmarkar says. "Studies
have shown activity in that brain area can
predict the future popularity of a product or
experience."
In her note, Karmarkar discusses research
by Emory University's Gregory Berns and Sara
Moore, who connected the dots between neural
activity and success in the music industry. In a
seminal lab experiment, teenagers listened to a
series of new, relatively unknown songs while
lying inside an fMRI machine. The researchers
found that the activity within the adolescents'
pleasure centers correlated with whether a song
achieved eventual commercial success. The
OneRepublic song Apologize performed
especially well in both the brain scans and the
market.
"Importantly, Berns and Moore also asked
their original study participants how much they
liked the songs they heard, but those responses
were not able to predict sales," Karmarker's
note states, illustrating the marketing value of
subconscious cerebral data.
Neuromarketing can provide important but
complex data to companies that target a global
audience. While product testing may provide
similar neural responses in American and Asian
subjects, for instance, the marketing
implications may be very different.
"Expressions of happiness in some Eastern
cultures are expressed as a sense of calm or
peace, whereas in some Western cultures,
happiness means jumping around with joy and
excitement," Karmarkar explains. "So you
might get two totally different fMRI results that
actually mean the same thing—or you may have
two totally different stimuli create the desired
effect of profound happiness, but for different
reasons. If you get an excited effect in an
Eastern market, it may not be a good outcome,
even though that was the effect you wanted in a
Western market. On the other hand, a sense of
peace might be misconstrued as a failure."
Valid concerns
For businesses looking to enlist the services
of a neuromarketing company, she advises
watching out for consultanting firms that claim
to offer such services but don't really have the
technology or expertise to back up the claim.
Rather, look for a company whose employees
have a healthy, skeptical respect for
neuroscience.
"The rubric for picking a good [firm] is
making sure it was started by a scientist, or has
a good science advisory board," Karmarkar
says. "This is a field where scientists are very,
very skeptical, and we should be. It's easy to
feel like you've discovered some big, important
truth when you see that the brain has done
something that correlates with behavior. And
it's just as easy to overstate our conclusions."
For consumers, the idea of giving
advertisers additional insight into the
subconscious mind might prompt privacy
concerns. But Karmarkar says that the research
is more about understanding brain waves, not
controlling them.
"It's similar to the concerns about genetics,"
she explains. "People wonder, now that we can
map the genome, are we going to manipulate
the genome? I think it's a valid and important
question to ask. But I don't think it's the
direction that companies should take or that
academics are taking."
She adds, though, that we need to keep in
mind that advertisers have been successfully
controlling our brains, to some extent, since
long before the existence of EEG or fMRI
technology.
"Imagine Angelina Jolie biting into an
apple," she says. "It's the juiciest apple ever.
She's licking her lips. There's juice running
down her chin. Now if I spend some time
setting up that scenario and then follow up by
asking you to tell me how much you like Mac
computers, I promise you that you'll rate them
more highly than you would have if I hadn't just
talked about how great that apple was for
Angelina Jolie. So, yes, I just used your brain to
manipulate you. Sex sells, and it has since the
dawn of time. It sells because it engages that
pleasurable reward center of your brain. As
academics, neuroscience just helps us to
understand how."
About the author
Carmen Nobel is senior editor of Harvard
Business School Working Knowledge.
HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL | WORKING KNOWLEDGE | HBSWK.HBS.EDU
COPYRIGHT 2012 PRESIDENT AND FELLOWS OF HARVARD COLLEGE 2
What Neuroscience Tells Us
About Consumer Desire
Published: March 26, 2012
Author: Carmen Nobel
It's easy for businesses to keep track of what
we buy, but harder to figure out why. Enter a
nascent field called neuromarketing, which uses
the tools of neuroscience to determine why we
prefer some products over others. Uma R.
Karmarkar explains how raw brain data is
helping researchers unlock the mysteries of
consumer choice. Key concepts include:
• When tracking brain functions,
neuroscientists generally use either
electroencephalography (EEG) or
functional magnetic resonance imaging
(fMRI) technology. EEG measures
fluctuations in the electrical activity directly
below the scalp, while fMRI tracks blood
flow throughout the brain.
• Studies have shown activity in that brain
area can predict the future popularity of a
product or experience.
• For businesses planning to outsource
neuromarketing services, Karmarkar
advises seeking out a firm that was founded
by a scientist, or one that has a strong
science advisory board.
In the early 1950s, two scientists at McGill
University inadvertently discovered an area of
the rodent brain dubbed "the pleasure center,"
located deep in the nucleus accumbens. When a
group of lab rats had the opportunity to
stimulate their own pleasure centers via a
lever-activated electrical current, they pressed
the lever over and over again, hundreds of times
per hour, foregoing food or sleep, until many of
them dropped dead from exhaustion. Further
research found pleasure centers exist in human
brains, too.
"People are fairly good at
expressing what they want,
what they like, or even how
much they will pay for an
item. But they aren't very
good at accessing where
that value comes from, or
how and when it is
influenced by factors like
store displays or brands."
Most humans are a little more complicated
than rats, of course. But we are largely
motivated by what makes us feel good,
especially when it comes to our purchasing
decisions. To that end, many major corporations
have begun to take special interest in how
understanding the human brain can help them
better understand consumers. Enter a nascent
but fast-growing field called neuromarketing,
which uses brain-tracking tools to determine
why we prefer some products over others.
"People are fairly good at expressing what
they want, what they like, or even how much
they will pay for an item," says Uma R.
Karmarkar, an assistant professor at Harvard
Business School who sports PhDs in both
marketing and neuroscience. "But they aren't
very good at accessing where that value comes
from, or how and when it is influenced by
factors like store displays or brands.
[Neuroscience] can help us understand those
hidden elements of the decision process."
To be sure, there is a clear difference
between the goals of academia and the goals of
a corporation in utilizing neuroscience. For
Karmarkar, her work falls into the category of
decision neuroscience, which is the study of
what our brains do as we make choices. She
harbors no motive other than to understand that
process and its implications for behavior, and
draws on concepts and techniques from
neuroscience to inform her research in
marketing.
For corporations, on the other hand, the
science is a means to an end goal of selling
more stuff. But the tools, once restricted to
biomedical research, are largely the same. And
Karmarkar expects brain data to play a key role
in future research on consumer choice.
(In a recent HBS industry background note
on neuromarketing, she discusses the
techniques that have helped researchers decode
secrets such as why people love artificially
colored snack food and how to predict whether
a pop song will be a hit or a flop.)
Tricks of the trade
When tracking brain functions,
neuroscientists generally use either
electroencephalography (EEG) or functional
magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)
technology. EEG measures fluctuations in the
electrical activity directly below the scalp,
which occurs as a result of neural activity. By
attaching electrodes to subjects' heads and
evaluating the electrical patterns of their brain
waves, researchers can track the intensity of
visceral responses such as anger, lust, disgust,
and excitement.
Karmarkar cites the example of junk-food
giant Frito-Lay, which in 2008 hired a
neuromarketing firm to look into how
consumers respond to Cheetos, the top-selling
brand of cheese puffs in the United States.
Using EEG technology on a group of willing
subjects, the firm determined that consumers
respond strongly to the fact that eating Cheetos
turns their fingers orange with residual cheese
dust. In her note, Karmarkar cites an article in
the August 2011 issue of Fast Company, which
describes how the EEG patterns indicated "a
sense of giddy subversion that consumers enjoy
over the messiness of the product."
That data in hand, Frito-Lay moved ahead
with an ad campaign called "The Orange
Underground," featuring a series of 30-second
TV spots in which the Cheetos mascot, Chester
Cheetah, encourages consumers to commit
subversive acts with Cheetos. (In one
commercial, an airline passenger quietly sticks
Cheetos up the nostrils of a snoring seatmate.
Problem solved.) The campaign garnered
Frito-Lay a 2009 Grand Ogilvy Award from the
Advertising Research Foundation.
COPYRIGHT 2012 PRESIDENT AND FELLOWS OF HARVARD COLLEGE 1
EEG vs. fMRI
Karmarkar notes that EEG and fMRI have
different strengths and weaknesses, and that
EEG has some limitations in its reach. "The cap
of electrodes sits on the surface of your head, so
you're never going to get to the deep areas of
the brain with EEG," Karmarkar explains.
The fMRI uses a giant magnet, often 3
Teslas strong, to track the blood flow
throughout the brain as test subjects respond to
visual, audio, or even taste cues. The
technology has its own logistical limitations.
Running an fMRI scanner costs researchers up
to $1,000 per hour, and studies often use 20-30
subjects, Karmarkar says. And while EEG lets
subjects move around during testing, fMRI
requires them to lie very still inside a machine
that can be intimidating.
"This is a sophisticated piece of medical
equipment that exerts a very strong magnetic
field at all times, and it's important to be very
careful around it," Karmarkar says. "For
example, you cannot take metal into a magnet
room!"
"Expressions of happiness
in some Eastern cultures
are expressed as a sense of
calm or peace, whereas in
some Western cultures,
happiness means jumping
around with joy and
excitement."
But fMRI is invaluable to neuroscience and
neuromarketing in that it gives researchers a
view into the aforementioned pleasure center.
"The more desirable something is, the more
significant the changes in blood flow in that
part of the brain," Karmarkar says. "Studies
have shown activity in that brain area can
predict the future popularity of a product or
experience."
In her note, Karmarkar discusses research
by Emory University's Gregory Berns and Sara
Moore, who connected the dots between neural
activity and success in the music industry. In a
seminal lab experiment, teenagers listened to a
series of new, relatively unknown songs while
lying inside an fMRI machine. The researchers
found that the activity within the adolescents'
pleasure centers correlated with whether a song
achieved eventual commercial success. The
OneRepublic song Apologize performed
especially well in both the brain scans and the
market.
"Importantly, Berns and Moore also asked
their original study participants how much they
liked the songs they heard, but those responses
were not able to predict sales," Karmarker's
note states, illustrating the marketing value of
subconscious cerebral data.
Neuromarketing can provide important but
complex data to companies that target a global
audience. While product testing may provide
similar neural responses in American and Asian
subjects, for instance, the marketing
implications may be very different.
"Expressions of happiness in some Eastern
cultures are expressed as a sense of calm or
peace, whereas in some Western cultures,
happiness means jumping around with joy and
excitement," Karmarkar explains. "So you
might get two totally different fMRI results that
actually mean the same thing—or you may have
two totally different stimuli create the desired
effect of profound happiness, but for different
reasons. If you get an excited effect in an
Eastern market, it may not be a good outcome,
even though that was the effect you wanted in a
Western market. On the other hand, a sense of
peace might be misconstrued as a failure."
Valid concerns
For businesses looking to enlist the services
of a neuromarketing company, she advises
watching out for consultanting firms that claim
to offer such services but don't really have the
technology or expertise to back up the claim.
Rather, look for a company whose employees
have a healthy, skeptical respect for
neuroscience.
"The rubric for picking a good [firm] is
making sure it was started by a scientist, or has
a good science advisory board," Karmarkar
says. "This is a field where scientists are very,
very skeptical, and we should be. It's easy to
feel like you've discovered some big, important
truth when you see that the brain has done
something that correlates with behavior. And
it's just as easy to overstate our conclusions."
For consumers, the idea of giving
advertisers additional insight into the
subconscious mind might prompt privacy
concerns. But Karmarkar says that the research
is more about understanding brain waves, not
controlling them.
"It's similar to the concerns about genetics,"
she explains. "People wonder, now that we can
map the genome, are we going to manipulate
the genome? I think it's a valid and important
question to ask. But I don't think it's the
direction that companies should take or that
academics are taking."
She adds, though, that we need to keep in
mind that advertisers have been successfully
controlling our brains, to some extent, since
long before the existence of EEG or fMRI
technology.
"Imagine Angelina Jolie biting into an
apple," she says. "It's the juiciest apple ever.
She's licking her lips. There's juice running
down her chin. Now if I spend some time
setting up that scenario and then follow up by
asking you to tell me how much you like Mac
computers, I promise you that you'll rate them
more highly than you would have if I hadn't just
talked about how great that apple was for
Angelina Jolie. So, yes, I just used your brain to
manipulate you. Sex sells, and it has since the
dawn of time. It sells because it engages that
pleasurable reward center of your brain. As
academics, neuroscience just helps us to
understand how."
About the author
Carmen Nobel is senior editor of Harvard
Business School Working Knowledge.
HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL | WORKING KNOWLEDGE | HBSWK.HBS.EDU
COPYRIGHT 2012 PRESIDENT AND FELLOWS OF HARVARD COLLEGE 2
The Brand and the Brain.
Bennett Kuhn Varner, Inc. Buckhead Centre 2964 Peachtree Road, Suite 700 Atlanta, GA 30305 PH 404.233.0332 FX 404.233.0302 www.bkv.com
B E N N E T T K U H N V A R N E R
The Brand and the Brain.
By
Jamie Turner
Director of Consumer Insights
Bennett Kuhn Varner
Recently, a team at the Baylor College of Medicine studied the brain scans of 67 people who were asked
to do blind taste tests of Coca-Cola and Pepsi. Participants were split virtually 50/50 over which soft
drink tasted better. But when the same people were tested again and told which brand of soft drink they
were drinking, 75% said they preferred Coke.
Coke vs. Pepsi
Why did the test subjects change their opinion? Why would they be split 50/50 in blind taste tests, but
prefer Coca-Cola three to one in the non-blind test? Because two different parts of the brain control taste
preference and brand preference. During blind taste tests, something called the ventrolateral prefrontal
cortex lights up, which helps drive sensory preferences such as taste. But when consumers know which
brand they’re drinking, the medial prefrontal cortex lights up, which helps drive brand preference.
In other words, because of Coke’s brand imagery, about 75% of the population thinks they prefer Coke
over Pepsi even though blind taste tests show that only about 50% do.
This is not entirely surprising. If you ask consumers what images pop into their heads when they think of
Coca-Cola, they’re likely to say Polar Bears, Santa Clause, Mean Joe Green and a whole slew of other
warmly-embraced American icons. If you ask the same consumers about Pepsi, the imagery isn’t quite
as deeply-rooted – they might indicate they link Pepsi to a pop star, but they won’t link Pepsi to the kind
of emotional American icons Coke has linked itself to.
Implications for marketers
As you might imagine, this study has powerful implications for Coke, Pepsi and anyone else interested
in selling more product. This budding field is called Neuromarketing and it relies on a brain-scanning
device called Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging, or fMRI. Scientists have used fMRIs to track
which regions of the brain light up when people recognize a face, hear a song, make a decision, pay
attention or sense deception.
Neuromarketing is currently the domain of larger corporations with significant marketing research
budgets. But traditional forms of research have shown that the more emotionally charged a
commercial is, the more likely the message is to be imbedded in a consumer’s mind. That’s
because in order for a long-term memory to be created, it must first have an emotional
component to it. (This explains why most people recall the Taco Bell Chihuahua or the
Energizer Bunny -- both of which tickled our emotional funny bones -- but can’t recall the last
Tylenol commercial they saw.)
Bennett Kuhn Varner, Inc. Buckhead Centre 2964 Peachtree Road, Suite 700 Atlanta, GA 30305 PH 404.233.0332 FX 404.233.0302 www.bkv.com
Criticism of Neuromarketing
For all its positive potential, Neuromarketing has its critics. An organization called Commercial Alert has
called it “Orwellian” and has sent a letter to the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and
Transportation asking for an investigation into Neuromarketing. The group’s executive director asked for
the investigation because he believed marketers could “trigger neural activity so as to modify behavior.”
But Dr. Steven Quartz, a neuroscientist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, CA disputes
such a claim. He points out that, “It’s pure fantasy to suppose that Neuromarketing is about embedding
subliminal messages.”
How is Neuromarketing currently being used?
For those with the research budgets to support Neuromarketing, it can be a powerful tool. In Hollywood,
movie trailers are now being tested using the fMRI method. Producers have found that a trailer’s success
is directly related to whether it engages people on an emotional level. DaimlerChrysler took fMRIs of
men’s brains as they looked at different images of cars. Not surprisingly, the sexy, racy sports cars
activated the men’s reward centers.
At Harvard, researchers found that in young heterosexual men, their brains were highly activated by
beautiful female faces. (Which begs the question, “Did they really have to spend money to figure that
out?”) And Dr. Gregory Berns of Emory University in Atlanta is studying how people’s opinions are
swayed by others. The research could shed light on products that become fads.
Implications for marketers.
While fMRI technology is currently out of reach of most marketers, these studies do validate a process
that BKV, one of the largest direct response agencies in the country, has practiced for some time. The
process involves using consumer insights to drive quantifiable, testable marketing results.
While this process doesn’t use fMRI technology, it does use highly sophisticated direct response
modeling in addition to a combination of inventive strategies, novel insights and good, old-fashioned hard
work.
In one instance, BKV used this process to test three distinct offers in a campaign targeting business
owners. One offer guaranteed a free duffel bag in return for meeting with a sales representative. Another
offer guaranteed $100 in return for meeting with a sales representative. But the winning offer, developed
by using BKV’s process, generated more than four times the results of the other two offers. And,
amazingly enough, the winning message didn’t require the client to give away any premium (such as the
duffel bag or the $100). It simply reflected extraordinary consumer insight in the messaging we
developed.
About BKV:
BKV is one of the largest independent marketing communications firms in the country. For more than 25
years, we’ve been helping clients like Six Flags, Cingular Wireless, The Home Depot and Black &
Decker develop response-oriented marketing campaigns that generate results.
If you’re interested in finding out how BKV can generate quantifiable results for you and your company,
give us a call at 404-233-0332. We’ll be glad to put our expertise to work for you.
B E N N E T T K U H N V A R N E R
The Brand and the Brain.
By
Jamie Turner
Director of Consumer Insights
Bennett Kuhn Varner
Recently, a team at the Baylor College of Medicine studied the brain scans of 67 people who were asked
to do blind taste tests of Coca-Cola and Pepsi. Participants were split virtually 50/50 over which soft
drink tasted better. But when the same people were tested again and told which brand of soft drink they
were drinking, 75% said they preferred Coke.
Coke vs. Pepsi
Why did the test subjects change their opinion? Why would they be split 50/50 in blind taste tests, but
prefer Coca-Cola three to one in the non-blind test? Because two different parts of the brain control taste
preference and brand preference. During blind taste tests, something called the ventrolateral prefrontal
cortex lights up, which helps drive sensory preferences such as taste. But when consumers know which
brand they’re drinking, the medial prefrontal cortex lights up, which helps drive brand preference.
In other words, because of Coke’s brand imagery, about 75% of the population thinks they prefer Coke
over Pepsi even though blind taste tests show that only about 50% do.
This is not entirely surprising. If you ask consumers what images pop into their heads when they think of
Coca-Cola, they’re likely to say Polar Bears, Santa Clause, Mean Joe Green and a whole slew of other
warmly-embraced American icons. If you ask the same consumers about Pepsi, the imagery isn’t quite
as deeply-rooted – they might indicate they link Pepsi to a pop star, but they won’t link Pepsi to the kind
of emotional American icons Coke has linked itself to.
Implications for marketers
As you might imagine, this study has powerful implications for Coke, Pepsi and anyone else interested
in selling more product. This budding field is called Neuromarketing and it relies on a brain-scanning
device called Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging, or fMRI. Scientists have used fMRIs to track
which regions of the brain light up when people recognize a face, hear a song, make a decision, pay
attention or sense deception.
Neuromarketing is currently the domain of larger corporations with significant marketing research
budgets. But traditional forms of research have shown that the more emotionally charged a
commercial is, the more likely the message is to be imbedded in a consumer’s mind. That’s
because in order for a long-term memory to be created, it must first have an emotional
component to it. (This explains why most people recall the Taco Bell Chihuahua or the
Energizer Bunny -- both of which tickled our emotional funny bones -- but can’t recall the last
Tylenol commercial they saw.)
Bennett Kuhn Varner, Inc. Buckhead Centre 2964 Peachtree Road, Suite 700 Atlanta, GA 30305 PH 404.233.0332 FX 404.233.0302 www.bkv.com
Criticism of Neuromarketing
For all its positive potential, Neuromarketing has its critics. An organization called Commercial Alert has
called it “Orwellian” and has sent a letter to the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and
Transportation asking for an investigation into Neuromarketing. The group’s executive director asked for
the investigation because he believed marketers could “trigger neural activity so as to modify behavior.”
But Dr. Steven Quartz, a neuroscientist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, CA disputes
such a claim. He points out that, “It’s pure fantasy to suppose that Neuromarketing is about embedding
subliminal messages.”
How is Neuromarketing currently being used?
For those with the research budgets to support Neuromarketing, it can be a powerful tool. In Hollywood,
movie trailers are now being tested using the fMRI method. Producers have found that a trailer’s success
is directly related to whether it engages people on an emotional level. DaimlerChrysler took fMRIs of
men’s brains as they looked at different images of cars. Not surprisingly, the sexy, racy sports cars
activated the men’s reward centers.
At Harvard, researchers found that in young heterosexual men, their brains were highly activated by
beautiful female faces. (Which begs the question, “Did they really have to spend money to figure that
out?”) And Dr. Gregory Berns of Emory University in Atlanta is studying how people’s opinions are
swayed by others. The research could shed light on products that become fads.
Implications for marketers.
While fMRI technology is currently out of reach of most marketers, these studies do validate a process
that BKV, one of the largest direct response agencies in the country, has practiced for some time. The
process involves using consumer insights to drive quantifiable, testable marketing results.
While this process doesn’t use fMRI technology, it does use highly sophisticated direct response
modeling in addition to a combination of inventive strategies, novel insights and good, old-fashioned hard
work.
In one instance, BKV used this process to test three distinct offers in a campaign targeting business
owners. One offer guaranteed a free duffel bag in return for meeting with a sales representative. Another
offer guaranteed $100 in return for meeting with a sales representative. But the winning offer, developed
by using BKV’s process, generated more than four times the results of the other two offers. And,
amazingly enough, the winning message didn’t require the client to give away any premium (such as the
duffel bag or the $100). It simply reflected extraordinary consumer insight in the messaging we
developed.
About BKV:
BKV is one of the largest independent marketing communications firms in the country. For more than 25
years, we’ve been helping clients like Six Flags, Cingular Wireless, The Home Depot and Black &
Decker develop response-oriented marketing campaigns that generate results.
If you’re interested in finding out how BKV can generate quantifiable results for you and your company,
give us a call at 404-233-0332. We’ll be glad to put our expertise to work for you.
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