Forget focus groups and questionnaires. The burgeoning research dubbed “neuromarketing” is looking into brain-scanning technology to analyze how people make buying decisions:

We’ve identified fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) as one of several new acronyms with staying power. (Check out 7 Biz Acronyms You Should Learn ASAP) and now a Wired News item is discussing the potential of this technology, which is essentially a fancy version of the MRI machines in hospitals.

Basically, fMRI allows neuroscientists to scan brain activity, discerning the movement of blood to the brain’s centers of pleasure, thought or memory. As such, it’s an essential part of an emerging body of research called “neuromarketing,” or developing advertising strategies that can trigger the desired mental reflexes. Over the past several years, researchers have been scanning the brain to track its activity while people think about things such as beer, cars and politicians.

“The hope in neuromarketing is that there’s some process in the brain that is a better predictor of whether people will actually buy things than what we already have,” Colin Camerer, professor of business economics at the California Institute of Technology, tells Wired News.

There’s already some major findings in this field. The most recent one involves Stanford University researchers who identified the parts of the brain that process two significant aspects of a choice–discerning how “cool” something is and figuring out the likelihood of winning it. The study, published in the May 11th issue of The Journal of Neuroscience, had subjects quickly press a button when they spotted a target on the screen. Before each round, they were told how much they might win in each round. The neuroscientists tracked the areas of the brain that grew excited throughout the process.

Such findings suggest that the scans can help marketers figure out how people really react to products. What’s more, “in the wildest dreams of researchers, their findings could help political leaders fine-tune how they make choices about everything from geopolitics to government finances,” says the Wired News article.

But before we get too worried about being manipulated, Antonio Rangel, assistant professor of economics at Stanford, points out that brain-scanning technology has a long way to go before it can help the likes of General Motors and Ford better appeal to consumers. He tells Wired News, “there is no single piece of science that I have seen that supports what they do.”

Source:

Advertisers Tap Brain Science
Randy Dotinga
Wired News, May 31, 2005
www.wired.com/news/medtech/0,1286,67597,00.html