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
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